This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many' lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable'. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places

While the spatializations of social exclusion have long been critically assessed, legislative responses to these exclusions have also been found to be limited. Addressing the exclusions of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans* and Queer people, social inclusions in the form of equalities legislations have been used as a marker of ‘progress’ and development, creating neo-colonial geographic comparisons between the legal and policy regimes of different contexts. Taking a decolonial optic, this paper shows that even in one of the most progressive legislative contexts – England – equalities legislation is differentially implemented, and indeed resisted by some local government organizations creating what we term as an implementation gap. This paper uses liveability as an understanding of the importance of recognition that does not proscribe restrictions, while also seeking ‘a life that is a life’. It works across India and the UK to create transnational thinking that seeks commonalities without negating difference, showing that liveability enables both an articulation of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans* and Queer people’s ongoing unease in England, and a counter-narrative to reductive readings of legislative oppression in India. In both countries, liveability refuses to negate the possibilities of legislation, but neither does it become beholden to them. Liveability, it is argued, has the potential to discursively unlink a naturalized linkage between sexual sub/ab/jects and a progress/backward binary. The paper concludes that liveable lives are fluid, contingent and can be precarious even with recognition. A decolonial optic refuses to place precarity in the ‘Backward Global South’ and recognition in the ‘progressive Global North’. Instead commonalities between Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans* and Queer lives query these assumptions and associated hierarchical politics of ‘saving’ ‘backward’ nations. This has the potential to deepen demands for social justice, in ways that do not abandon legislative reforms, but go beyond them to seek lives that are ‘worth living’, including through transnational interconnections and solidarities.

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Participatory strategies have generated a critical body of work examining the meaning of empowerment and urban policy-making in societies undergoing a shift from government to governance. Discussions on the institutionalized limits of participatory policies and genealogies of participatory discourses have often shed inadequate light on the perspective of the economically marginalized. My study draws from ethnographic fieldwork in an urban slum in India and engages with the personal and collective assessments of a group of 18 women volunteering for health improvement in their communities. I look at select instances of self-governance and demonstrate how volunteers seek to transform their social statuses and convince themselves to continue to take responsibility for their community’s health improvement. At the same time, community volunteers are not automatons. Against existing material and social challenges, they develop an ambivalent relationship with their volunteering roles and demand a ‘salary’ equivalent to their ‘work’.

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