Queer and Trans Refugee Digital Storytelling & Archive Project Receives UCHRI Grant

"Crossing Pride" brings together UC scholars and transnational activists

Crossing Pride: Queer and Trans Refugee Transnational Storytelling & Digital Archiving is a performance, healing, and community-based project that centers creative expression by and for queer and trans refugees. Collaborating with local refugee-led healing communities, Crossing Pride aims to create a sustainable transnational support network connecting participants and collaborators in unsafe home countries and those who are internally displaced with those who have already migrated elsewhere. By linking local communities transnationally, Crossing Pride seeks to create opportunities for refugees to further share their experiences and creative responses publicly, with plans to develop a community digital archive that facilitates transnational networks for sharing information, resources, and support which can also serve as an educational tool for informing public conversations and policy debates.

Crossing Pride brings together four core collaborators—Jeanne Scheper, Associate Professor and Chair of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UCI; Debanuj DasGupta, Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies, UCSB; Anna Winget, UCI alum and UCHRI Affiliated Scholar; Ronah Ainembambazi, Stockholm, founder of NGO Maama Girls Foundation, Uganda — building upon two decades of their combined individual research, policy, and community organizing experience, including robust existing transnational partnerships that center queer and trans refugee voices by producing community-based storytelling in the context of local, trauma-informed, healing spaces.