lambda nordica welcomes new editor-in-chief Katharina Kehl!

Who are you and what do you bring to lambda nordica? 

I tend to describe myself as an interdisciplinary scholar who studies national(ist) boundary-making from a queer perspective. This means I am interested in how different political projects of belonging include and exclude people along lines of race, sexuality, and gender, and what kind of possible and impossible subject positions this creates in different contexts. I have e.g. analysed homonationalist mobilisations of LGBTQ rights in migration discourses, primarily in Sweden, and since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 I also study these issues in the context of war, militarisation and re-armament. My PhD is in peace and development studies, so I relate a lot to emerging fields like queer international relations, queer security studies, and queer migration studies.

Prior to my academic career, I have worked as a freelance journalist (among others for the German queer-feminist Missy Magazine) and editorial intern for various media outlets, so putting together a journal is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I have also been an educator for the Swedish LBTQ-organisation RFSL, and I still regularly teach and hold norm-critical trainings for practitioners and students in healthcare and medical training.

What are your visions and plans for lambda nordica? 

As a German, and thus someone who entered the Scandinavian research landscape on gender and sexuality from “the outside”, I have used and appreciated lambda nordica as a reliable guide to both research and political developments in the field since my time as a Master’s student. Being able to contribute to its continued relevance and future evolution in the coming years is therefore super exciting. And while this is starting to turn into a sad cliché, in times like these, with racist, anti-queer, anti-democratic politics advancing and entrenching their position, we need spaces for knowledge exchange, solidarity, and collaboration more than ever. So for me the focus is on continuing and consolidating the excellent work that Elizabeth and Erika have been doing with lambda nordica as an independent, open-access, multi-language publishing platform, as well as making sure that lambda becomes accessible and relevant to an even larger global community of scholars and activists. This includes securing continued funding, working towards a consolidation of scholarly networks, and creating more space for collaboration between scholars and activists.