Liveable lives

The main research objective of this research is to move beyond the analysis of exclusion/inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) communities in UK and India. It uses innovative transnational PAR methodologies and a mixed methods design that refuse the Global North-progress/Global South-backward dichotomies in order to:

• transnationally identify what makes lives liveable for marginalised LGBTQ people. This will not take a comparative approach as this presumes two places have distinct, static elements that are comparable that can be mined for similarities and differences. It will look instead at the ways in which places produce differential liveabilities in the cracks and fissures of regulatory normativities, where legislative change has supposedly been achieved and where it is still ongoing. How can transnational activisms create and demand new forms of social justice?
• consider liveable lives constituted through policy and cultural indicators rather than focusing on violence/crime and/or legislative change, as has been the focus of measures of inclusion/equalities. How can social marginalisation be addressed given the emerging issues of legislative inclusions? What can make life more liveable beyond legal protections for those marginalised by their sexual and gender difference in India and the UK?
• spatially explore liveability locally/nationally/transnationally, questioning the homogeneity of national proclamations of 'inclusion'/'exclusion', understanding that measures of national/supra-national legislative changes are not necessarily locally experienced.
• engage with the ways in which intersectionalities/multiple marginalisations rework liveabilities working for and against the inclusion of some LGBTQ people such that, for example the 'gay capital of the UK', Brighton, continues to be experienced as transphobic.
• examine moves beyond inclusion/exclusion. This spatially nuanced research engagement both identifies what might change in everyday spaces and then experiments with producing new social-spatial orders, exploring how places can be made liveable for marginalised LGBTQ people. How life might be made liveable within and beyond these broader legislative contexts? What makes place safer, more useable and how everyday practices can be altered to form new social relations?

The concept of Liveable Lives has the potential to develop new ways of thinking and talking about the concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people, and might help to inform new initiatives and strategies beyond the equalities agenda.