Roundtable Discussion: Queer Now!

James Cummings is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. He is interested in relationships between sexuality, being and living and uses ethnographic methods to explore how such relationships play out in everyday life and across life courses. He primarily works with queer men in the People’s Republic of China, focusing specifically on Hainan Province. James is the author of the book The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). 

Mary Laing is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. She is a collaborative and interdisciplinary researcher focusing on sex work and the sex industry. She researches non-heteronormative and queer sex work, sex work and technologies, academic experiences of researching the sex industry, safety and violence, participatory methods and human rights. She has publications in Sexualities, British Journal of Criminology, Journal of Law and Society and Geoforum and is editor of two published collections with Routledge. Mary has worked with a wide range of stakeholders, and is a founding board member, ex-vice chair and current academic trustee of National Ugly Mugs (NUM), an award-winning sex worker safety organisation.

Melissa Oliver-Powell is a Lecturer in Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York. Melissa is a comparative film scholar with a background in modern languages and a particularly passionate focus on intersectional feminist and queer theories. She is the author of Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in the Sixties (Berghahn Books 2022) and has published on topics including reproductive rights in the French New Wave, gendered labour and race in post-independence Senegalese cinema, and reproductive justice and the welfare state in British social realism.

Natasha Tanna is a Lecturer in World Literature in the Department for English and Related Literature, University of York. She is the author of Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona (Legenda 2019) as well as articles on queer and feminist literature in journals such as Feminist Theory and Comparative Literature. She recently held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a project on queer and decolonial feminisms in Latin America with a focus on the connections between literature and activism in the region. Natasha is currently working on an edited volume provisionally titled Creaction: Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice that explores the possibilities of creative-critical writing in addressing the potential exclusions of conventional academic forms.