AAMR Fellows

B Camminga (they/them) is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society, Wits University, South Africa. They work broadly on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent with a specific focus on transgender migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In 2018 they were runner up in the Africa Spectrum: Young African Scholars Award, which honours outstanding research by up-and-coming African scholars. Their first monograph Transgender Refugees & the Imagined South Africa (Palgrave, 2019), received the 2019 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (with Aren Azuira) and honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology from the American Anthropology Association. They are the co-convenor of the African LGBTQI+ Migration Research Network (ALMN). The network aims to advance scholarship on all facets of LGBTQI+ migration on, from and too the African continent by bringing together scholars, researchers, practitioners, activists and service providers to spark critical conversations, promote knowledge exchange, support evidence-based policy responses, and initiate effective and ethical collaborations. The network’s first collection - Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Diaspora and Asylum (Zed) - will be published in 2022.

Camminga's work considers the interrelationship between the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North and the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from the African continent. Their research interests include: transgender rights, migration, asylum and diasporas; necropolitics, notions of privacy & the bureaucratisation of sex/gender; and the history of ‘trans phenomena’ in South Africa. They are interested in what the different invocations of gender and sex mean in relation to available rights and protections, and how this works in tension with local, regional and transnational perceptions (and antagonisms) over the ‘human’ of human rights.

Camminga, B. 2021. ‘“Go Fund Me”: LGBTI Asylum Seekers in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya’. In Waitinghood: Unpacking the Temporalities of Waiting and Irregular Migration, edited by Christine M. Jacobs, Shahram Khosravi, and Mary-Anne Karlsen, 131–49. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/waiting-temporalities-irregular-migration-christine-jacobsen-marry-anne-karlsen-shahram-khosravi/e/10.4324/9780429351730.
Camminga, B. 2021. ‘LGBTQI+ and Nowhere to Go: The Makings of a Refugee Population without Refuge’. African Security 14 (4): 370–90.
Camminga, B. 2020. ‘Disregard and Danger: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voices of Trans (and Cis) African Feminists’. The Sociological Review Monographs 68 (4): 817–33.
Camminga, B. 2020. ‘Encamped within a Camp: Transgender Refugees and Kakuma Refugee Camp (Kenya)’. In Invisibility in African Displacements, edited by Jesper Bjarnesen and Simon Turner, 36–52. London: Zed Books.
Camminga, B, and Zethu Matebeni, eds. 2019. Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in Africa’s ‘Gay Capital’. Johannesburg: Unisa Press.
Camminga, B. 2019. Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies over Borders and Borders over Bodies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.