Research as Relation: Reimagining Scholarship through Queering, Art and Care with LGBTQIA+ Refugees

This PhD research examines how engaged, co-creative research can transform both knowledge production and the relations through which knowledge is made. Grounded in a long-term, arts-based collaboration with LGBTQIA+ refugees in the Netherlands, the dissertation highlights research primarily as a relational practice shaped by power, care, vulnerability, and imagination. Bringing together queer theory, feminist and decolonial scholarship, engaged research methodologies, and arts-based methods, the research develops key concepts such as liminality, rhizomatic knowledge, relational autonomy, and non- paternalistic care, showing how these unfold in practice through co-creation. Knowledge is approached as relational and emergent, produced through encounters and shared meaning- making rather than detached observation or one-way interviews. At the heart of this research journey is the co-creative research project LIMBO, a multi-year collaboration between queer refugees (several of them being artists), an art institution, and academia. LIMBO functioned as a space for artistic expression, storytelling, and collective reflection, where all involved (queer refugee and/ or migrant workshop facilitators, queer refugee participants during their asylum procedure, and researchers) explored experiences of displacement, belonging, identity, healing and care, through poetry, visual art, performance, dialogue and co-authorship. Each chapter is informed by different aspects of queer refugees’ lived knowledges about survival, chosen family, community, and care. In contrast to research that approaches refugees primarily through lack – asking what they need (to do) to ‘integrate properly’ – also described as a deficit-approach – this dissertation works from a desire-based orientation. Rather than treating participants’ integration as a problem to be solved, a desire-based approach attends to what people aspire to, imagine, actively create, even under conditions of exclusion or scrutiny. This research foregrounds queer refugees’ knowledge, skills, creativity and critique, and asks what becomes possible when those capacities are taken seriously as sources of insight. It shows how generative such desire-based approach can be, producing alternative, thick, layered knowledges, as a well as academic and non-academic output (e.g., artworks, exhibitions, co-created booklets with stories and art1). Art functions as a mode of theorizing and world-making, enabling affective, embodied, and collective forms of insight that exceed conventional academic language. At the same time, the work resists idealized narratives of care and creative co-creation, by examining tensions, conflict, boundary-setting and failure, as part of ethical relational work. Care is understood as reciprocal, demanding, uneven, and continuously negotiated. Finally, the dissertation situates the research within a wider political climate marked by the normalization of radical-right discourse, scapegoating of refugees and LGBTQIA+ communities, and pressures on democratic norms. Against this backdrop, it frames co- creative scholarship as an epistemic counter-practice which cultivates listening, collective imagination, and storytelling that challenges dehumanization and promote solidarity-based ways of knowing.