FACULTY OF HEALTH AND SOCIETY | Lecture
Open Keynotes by Róisín Ryan-Flood and Jenny Gunnarsson Payne

This talk takes as its point of departure a series of encounters from an ongoing research project on queer migration, in which we interview LGBTQ+ individuals seeking asylum in Sweden. These encounters illustrate how qualitative interviewing in contexts marked by legal, material, and social precarity extends far beyond the production of ‘data’, engaging researchers and participants in ethically complex dynamics of trust and distrust, expectation, and mutual projections. Focusing on the specific challenges of interviewing people who are currently – or have recently been – subject to asylum procedures where narrative credibility is central to their claims, I explore how Judith Butler’s theorisation of narrativity and accountability and their contributions to relational ethics, together with insights from psychoanalytically informed theory (especially the notions of transference and counter-transference), can help us better understand the difficult intersubjective dynamics that emerge between interviewer and interviewee in contexts pervasively shaped by precarity in different ways.

This presentation explores the possibilities and tensions of queering methodology, with particular attention to ethics, visibility, and representation. To queer methodology is to question the assumptions of neutrality, objectivity, and universality that often structure research practices, and to foreground the relational, situated, and embodied dimensions of knowledge production. Drawing on queer theory and critical methodological debates, this work considers how researchers might attend ethically to the vulnerabilities of queer subjects and communities while resisting normative demands for legibility and assimilation. The paper interrogates the politics of visibility, examining both the liberatory potential and the risks of making queer lives knowable within academic and institutional frameworks. It also addresses the challenges of representation, asking how to tell stories that are partial, contingent, and accountable, without collapsing difference or reinscribing marginalisation. Ultimately, queering methodology is presented as an ongoing, necessarily unfinished practice of unsettling dominant epistemologies, creating space for multiplicity, and centring ethical responsibility in research.