Dr B Camminga is an African Fellow at IASH from October 2020 to January 2021. They are based at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand.
Transgender refugees from the African continent have come into stark, purposeful visibility either as groups or as individuals in several centres around the globe. This visibility has been a two-fold process – happening firstly within asylum systems both in the Global North, predominantly Sweden, the UK, the US and Canada, and on the African continent (surprisingly not in South Africa but in Kenya, where these identities remain criminalised), and secondly across various forms of social media where transgender refugees have actively harnessed digital platforms. It is this emergent digital visibility and its impact that my project is interested in. Entitled "Trans at the Border: Hostility, Visibility and the Digital Diasporic Voices of Africa’s Transgender Refugees", my research project understands these refugees to be active producers of diasporic narratives of existence projected back at the African continent. At the heart of this project is an emergent visibility of an actively engaged group of people - transgender refugees from the African continent, forming what could be construed as a digital diaspora. These self-styled diasporic publications actively establish these refugees as both transgender and African – a narrative of existence which is directly antagonistic to that espoused by countries of origin. This study understands diaspora as existing when a dispersed or displaced group self-mobilises while imagining and constructing transnational linkages around a particular discourse, identity or experience. The Internet has reduced the distance between countries of origin and settlement allowing for the transport of messages, ideas and identities bypassing various social, political and physical boundaries. Trans asylum seekers from the African continent in the diaspora have also established a digital presence affirming their existence, projecting a particular visibility back at the continent, establishing themselves as both transgender and African.
One of my most recent publications: https://www.mahpsa.org/marooned-transgender-asylum-seekers-in-johannesburg/