This article considers how the Scottish heritage sector has responded to allegations that it is part of larger infrastructures for imagining, centring, and privileging the reproduction of whiteness. It traces key debates about Scottish identity over the past two decades before exploring a number of recent projects within the heritage sector (in which one or both of the present authors have participated) that have sought to challenge the institutional whiteness of Scottish museums. In particular, it draws on the findings of: EDI in Scottish Heritage (EDISH), a project which fed into the Scottish Government-commissioned project Empire, Slavery and Scotland’s Museums (2022) that was coordinated by Museums Galleries Scotland; and concludes with small number of connected cases studies from a recent project, ‘“White Thinking” and the failed promise of diversity in Scottish heritage’, involving several heritage institutions which aimed to better understand the practical and ideological constraints on the ability to enact transformational change in the sector.

This article draws on existing interviews and creative material from LGBTQ + South Asians who have lived and spent significant time in the UK as part of the Cross Border Queers project. It begins by considering creative forms of diasporic activism and creativity in the UK that have emerged from South Asian LGBTQ + communities and individuals. We discuss the ways in which South Asian LGBTQ + diasporic organising was formed through a sense of shared racial and class solidarity and especially under the umbrella of political Blackness. We then move on to the role played by cultural activism to see how artists have used culture as a way to advance social change and increase the visibility of South Asian LGBTQ + communities in the UK. We place different genres of visual culture, curation, performance and oral history to evoke how South Asian queer migrants articulate a distinct form of subjectivity and aesthetic practice.

Churnjeet Mahn considers the novel within the context of a travel writing genre historically intertwined with questions of racial and colonial othering. Mahn's analysis reveals Kunzru's ironic manipulation of academic discourses surrounding diasporic identity to be played out at the level not only of theme but also genre, as Kunzru employs a parody of dominant colonial modes of representation in travel writing to expose the apparatus of structural inequalities faced by marginalised minorities in the Western world. Mahn employs the work of Homi K. Bhabha to trace the anxious journey of Pran as he attempts to cross the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality, not in isolation from each other or in favour of straightforward models of hybridity, but rather with a problematised discourse that very much positions Kunzru as an interlocutor in existing postcolonial fictions.

Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that take up different iterations of queer rights and authoritarianism in South Asia and its diaspora, the article outlines how LGBTQI+ actors' negotiation of authoritarian regimes has produced fragile coalitions and new transnational formations.

The separation of old (pre-1992) or research-intensive, and new (post-1992) or teaching-led universities remains a salient and significant division within the landscape of Higher Education (HE) in the UK.In this chapter I examine the division's continued naturalisation, by exploring and complicating the discourses of 'quality', 'diversity', and 'employability' that commonly attach to it.The division is sustained by a number of widespread assumptions not just about the intellectual labour that takes place at different types of HE institutions, but also about the students who study at them, and it therefore has significant discursive and political implications that serve to reinforce educational and other inequalities.I argue that challenging these institutional divisions should be at the forefront of any critical approaches to UK HE, and further that queer approaches are particularly well placed to offer such a challenge, in the spirit of queer sharing across the division.

This paper seeks to extend existing discussions of post-disaster tourism in New Orleans by considering how competing narratives of disaster operate within the tourist experience available in New Orleans. More specifically, we explore how personal reflections and the collective memories of a community are practiced and mobilised as occasions for tourists to connect with and share in memories of disaster in post-Katrina New Orleans. We suggest that in a city where tourism has long been vital to the economic, social and cultural make-up of the place the power of sharing has emerged through personal narratives, artefacts and experiences that, more than a decade after the disaster, are woven into the tourist experience by individuals such as tour guides, curators of exhibitions, street artists, and participants in anniversary ceremonies.

Heritage and Borders introduces readers to a series of valuable case studies and attempts to draw broader conclusions on the topic but has necessary limitations due to the scope of the case studies...

There is relative invisibility and silence around the presence, management and support of queer people in mainstream refugee organizations in the United Kingdom. Institutional silencing exists, particularly where visibility or acknowledgement has the potential to disrupt existing structures. At the same time, queer refugees face the risk of exclusion, and may also undertake self-censoring. Drawing on empirical data from an innovative, cross-disciplinary, community-based participatory research project between a United Kingdom-based refugee organization and two universities, this article explores the viability, complexities and tensions inherent in making queer identities visible. While highlighting the potential of arts-based methods to explore inclusive approaches to sexuality, we discuss the limits of this work and the resistance it created. This article is co-authored by members of RX—a collective of young people with refugee backgrounds; two community researchers; a humanities researcher; and a peace-studies researcher.

Beginning with contemporary calls to decolonise travel writing, this article considers the intersection of race and sexuality in the genre. Why is the analysis of postcolonial travel writing so straight? Why is the analysis of queer travel writing so white? By answering these questions simultaneously, the article argues for the creation of a space from which we can understand how single-issue approaches to identity politics fail to take account of structural forms of homophobia and racism. Acknowledging their structural manifestations through the history of colonialism should advance an understanding of how and why some of the most historically queer-inclusive and diverse places in the world have come to be represented as the most hostile to queers in travel writing.

What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, 'do'? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope. Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.