El Beaton

El Beaton (She/They) is a fellow of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, with funding to complete an MSc in Social Research and a PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Their undergraduate thesis entitled “Queer Frames and Framing Queers: Identity, Belonging, and Community among Queer Migrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in MyKali” was awarded the best dissertation in the University of Edinburgh’s Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies department (2022). Developing these same themes, their doctoral research seeks to critically examine the priorities and experiences of transgender migrants from the MENA region within Western European asylum systems. Informed by their personal-cum-political position as a trans person, their work intends to posit a necropolitical challenge to prevailing notions of Western queer liberation by exposing the racialised politics of gender and queerness within Fortress Europe. El is humbled to join the Stuart Hall fellowship and looks forward to engaging with a wider community of artists and scholars to imagine new futures for queer migration.