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ABSTRACT Since their invention, picture postcards have played a key role in circulating racist and imperial ideologies. In this paper, the researcher explores how experiments in producing and exchanging postcards used in the Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) project attempted to subvert traditional anthropological and colonial perspectives. Drawing on examples created for the exhibition Exchanging Cultures of Equality held in London in 2018, the author discusses how GlobalGRACE researchers in six different countries individually and collectively sought to disrupt and challenge historical imaginaries using postcards. The creative process required them consider how they might differently visualize, articulate, and publicly share ideas about their work and field sites while also asserting the value of transnational exchange. The researcher argues that critical reflection on the tensions and challenges that arose from this transnational collaborative experiment are both productive and necessary in informing further and new decolonising engagements with postcards

AbstractIn this paper, I demonstrate how statist logics concerning acceptable lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) immigrants permeate civic spheres, creating new forms of exclusion for asylum seekers in the United States. Existing research on US asylum policy and procedures as they pertain to LGBT claimants suggests that a "gay enough" litmus test typifies U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjudications, such that officers expect claimants to engage in conspicuous consumption of stereotypical commodities and culture and to appear visibly "LGBT," either through gender non‐conformity or by being "out." My analysis focuses on the social as well as legal lives of LGBT asylum seekers in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected at specialist NGOs, I argue that limited ideas about LGBT subjectivity often structure NGO workers' attitudes and practices in ways that echo USCIS criteria for granting asylum. I demonstrate how NGO client selection and intake processes assume homonormative ideals and subtly yet effectively replicate existing adjudication norms. Within ostensibly non‐governmental spaces, LGBT asylum seekers experience suspicion, surveillance, and pressure to conform to NGO workers' expectations of "credible" claimants. Contrary to NGOs' stated intentions, these processes extend, rather than challenge, existing barriers to asylum.

The Museo Migrante (MuMi) is a travelling pop-up exhibition constructed by and for indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in collaboration with the locally based NGO Voces Mesoamericanas. MuMi is designed to make visible the complex roots and consequences of domestic as well as international migration by revealing the stories of those who move—and of those who can, or do not. Its interventions aim not only to inform but also to examine the processes and material culture of knowledge and memory construction—both collective and individual—and to invite reflection on identity, dignity, rights, and freedom. In addition to its function as a tool for political education, we explain how the naming and operation of MuMi further interrupts popular, nationalist ideas about 'the museum', including whose voices, images, art, and ideas 'belong' within it. In contrast with the calcifying framing of Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropología, in which indigenous peoples and cultures are consigned to a distant past, MuMi presents images, texts, objects, and creative activities that are continuously reshaped and reinterpreted as it travels between locations, facilitating conversations across and within communities that consider pasts, presents, and possible futures. Throughout the chapter, we guide readers to engage in a series of activities that visitors might encounter at MuMi. In doing so, we demonstrate how interaction, affect, and personal reflection can not only highlight the lived realities of (im)mobility, but may also open spaces for forms of knowledge production that challenge the dominant narratives of the modern nation-state.