On Tuesday October 6, 2026, NOG member Tegiye Birey will defend her PhD dissertation “Relational Solidarity: A Decolonial Feminist Ethnography of the Asylum Movement in Malmö.”
In her dissertation, Tegiye Birey examines how solidarity is practiced across differences of legal status, race and gender within the asylum movement that mobilised in Malmö, Sweden, in the years following 2015. She challenges the prevailing categorisation of migration solidarity as either vertical or horizontal, proposing instead relational solidarity: an understanding of solidarity as an embodied, historically situated practice emerging from colonial histories and contemporary racialised, gendered and neoliberal conditions. Situating Swedish state feminism within a colonial history that Nordic exceptionalism works to disavow, she argues that gender equality itself functions as a mechanism for drawing national boundaries.
According to Tegiye, feminist theory and critical migration studies share a concern with solidarity across difference but rarely speak to one another. Bringing them together with critical race theory, queer theory and affect theory, and drawing on thirteen months of activist ethnography, she traces solidarity through four registers: intersectional politics, social reproduction, coalitional welfare politics, and sociality. She shows that practical solidarity was largely performed by women as gendered reproductive labour, that asylum-seeking minors built coalitions with citizens affected by welfare restructuring, and that friendship and affect constituted political terrains that unsettled state sovereignty over belonging.
Furthermore, Tegiye argues that intersectionality requires a critical account of culture to address cultural racism, that an ethics of care framework romanticises the racialised division of social reproduction, and that migrants’ affective agency, including the complaints of the so-called ungrateful migrant, constitutes a form of political agency. Methodologically, she introduces speculative positionalities to describe how ambiguous researcher positions are constructed and undone through collective reflexivity. The dissertation offers activist movements a language for engaging solidarity across difference without reproducing colonial patterns of extraction, hierarchy and erasure.
Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Time: 16:15-17:15h
Location: Hybrid. Live: Academiegebouw, Domplein 29 in Utrecht.
Title: Relational Solidarity: A Decolonial Feminist Ethnography of the Asylum Movement in Malmö
Supervisors: Prof. dr. S. Ponzanesi, Dr. E. Helms, Dr. E. Midden, Dr. D. Olivieri
