B Camminga

B Camminga (they/them) received a PhD from the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, in 2016. They have since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), Wits University, and several visiting fellowships, including at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford.

Invested in African feminist, queer, and trans futures, their work is concerned with issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent.

Their multidisciplinary research pays particular attention to how the term ‘transgender’ moves and migrates and the meaning it makes as it does so. In recent years, this has meant a focus on transgender migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, on and from the African continent.

Their first monograph, Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa (Palgrave, 2019), received the 2019 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (with Aren Aizura) and honourable mention in the Ruth Benedict Prize for Queer Anthropology. In 2021 they were awarded Best Published Essay (Junior Scholar) by the Queer African Studies Association for ‘Disregard and Danger: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Voices of Trans (and Cis) African Feminists’ as well as being one of the Special Invited Thematic Co-Chairs at the UNHCR Global Roundtable on Protection and Solutions for LGBTIQ people in forced displacement

They are the co-convenor of the African LGBTQI+ Migration Research Network (ALMN), which aims to advance scholarship on all facets of LGBTQI+ migration on, from, and to the African continent by bringing together scholars, researchers, practitioners and activists to promote knowledge exchange and support evidence-based policy responses.

B is co-editor of Beyond the Mountain: Queer Life in Africa’s “Gay Capital,” (Unisa, 2019) with zethu Matebeni, and Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Diaspora, and Asylum (Bloomsbury, 2022) with John Marnell. They are an editorial board member at the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies (BATS).  Their work has appeared in journals including Sexualities, The Sociological Review, Gender, Place and Culture and Transgender Studies Quarterly.

B is a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin and a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), Wits University.