Apostolos Andrikopoulos’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

Guided by social justice and sexual health concerns, scholars of same‐sex sexualities in Africa have mainly examined related conflicts and inequities, generating an unbalanced emphasis on homophobia. Following Stella Nyanzi's plea for a broader exploration of queer sexuality in Africa, we move beyond the strictly sexual sphere to study the kinship arrangements of same‐sex couples in Kenya. These couples rely on the different possibilities afforded by kinship – in both its inclusive and exclusive capacities – to create accommodation and acceptance. Capturing the complexities and paradoxes of social life, the ethnographic study of kinship practices in everyday life shows how homophobia and accommodation can co‐exist. Furthermore, the embeddedness of same‐sex relationships in kinship structures and the subscription of same‐sex couples to the same norms held by cross‐sex couples clearly indicates the difficulty of construing these forms of relatedness as essentially different from other kinship formations. Thus ‘queering queer Africa’ requires not only taking a broader perspective and looking beyond what is usually classified as ‘queer’ but also un‐queering what at first appears as queer and thus ‘queerying’ the barriers and the range of possibilities that characterize the lives and subjectivities of people with same‐sex desires.

This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.

Although kinship has long since been established as a topic in migration research, migration scholars often lacked an analytical concept of kinship and relied on their own ethnocentric understandings and legal definitions. Reconciling insights from the anthropology of kinship and migration studies, we outline how a new theorization of kinship could be suitable and helpful for the study of migration and mobility. First, we need a conceptualization that accounts for kinship’s flexible and dynamic character in changing settings. Second, it is imperative to pay close attention to the intricate ways kinship interrelates with state politics. Lastly, an analytical notion of kinship should take into account that kinship relations can also have negative implications for the persons concerned. Articles in this Special Issue are attentive to these caveats and approach through the prism of kinship different issues of migration and mobility.

In the name of women’s protection, Dutch immigration authorities police cross-border marriages differentiating between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of marriage (e.g. ‘forced’, ‘sham’, ‘arranged’). The categorisation of marriages between ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’ derives from the assumption that interest and love are and should be unconnected. Nevertheless, love and interest are closely entwined and their consideration as separate is not only misleading but affects the exchanges that take place within marriage and, therefore, has particular implications for spouses, especially for women. The ethnographic analysis of marriages between unauthorised African male migrants and (non-Dutch) EU female citizens, often suspected by immigration authorities of being ‘sham’, demonstrate the complex articulation of love and interest and the consequences of neglecting this entanglement – both for the spouses and scholars. The cases show that romantic love is not a panacea for unequal gender relations and may place women in a disadvantaged position – all the more so because the norms of love are gendered and construe self-sacrifice as more fundamental in women’s manifestations of love than that of men’s.

Marriages that involve the migration of at least one of the spouses challenge two intersecting facets of the politics of belonging: the making of the ‘good and legitimate citizens’ and the ‘acceptable family’. In Europe, cross-border marriages have been the target of increasing state controls, an issue of public concern and the object of scholarly research. The study of cross-border marriages and the ways these marriages are framed is inevitably affected by states’ concerns and priorities. There is a need for a reflexive assessment of how the categories employed by state institutions and agents have impacted the study of cross-border marriages. The introduction to this Special Issue analyses what is at stake in the regulation of cross-border marriages and how European states use particular categories (e.g. ‘sham’, ‘forced’ and ‘mixed’ marriages) to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable marriages. When researchers use these categories unreflexively, they risk reproducing nation-centred epistemologies and reinforcing state-informed hierarchies and forms of exclusion. We suggest ways to avoid these pitfalls: differentiating between categories of analysis and categories of practice, adopting methodologies that do not mirror nation-states’ logic and engaging with general social theory outside migration studies. The empirical contributions of the Special Issue offer new insights into a timely topic.

This article uses the concept of hospitality to examine the relations between native-born Greeks and recently arrived immigrants in a Greek urban neighborhood. Beyond romanticized notions of hospitality as a moral obligation or national virtue, this article considers hospitality as a power relation and a control mechanism of social behavior and cultural production. Although relations between hosts and guests are interpersonal, their (perceived) statuses are often enmeshed in macro hierarchical structures. The concept of hospitality helps us to shift scales and examine host-guest relations at the micro-level of a neighborhood in relation to wider political and economic constellations. However, the scalar dimensions of hospitality have limitations. This ethnographic study shows that ethnic Greek ‘repatriates’ from the former Soviet Union, despite their ideological incorporation in the home of the Greek nation, are treated by native-born Greeks, at the neighborhood level, as guests who must comply with the rules of hospitality. At the same time, regardless of their legal exclusion and stigmatization in official discourses, Albanian immigrants, who have accepted the role of guests and imitate the socio-cultural patterns of their native-Greek neighbors, are received better than Greek ‘repatriates’.