Davis’ PhD research aims to explore the emergence of networks of queer and trans people of colour activist groups across the UK, specifically to address a significant gap in knowledge of how those who are multiply minoritised across the intersecting vectors of race, gender and sexuality individually and collectively navigate identity, subjectivity and multiple intersecting oppressions. Previous research points to the importance of social support for QTPOC and how this is often undermined by the multiple communities they are a part of failing to support them; there is the need to explore identity and subjectivity using intersectionality to combat fragmentary impulses and to consider how QTPOC negotiate intersecting stresses and microaggressions. In this research literature there has, however, been a tendency to focus on individual queer and trans people of colour, in isolation from one another, their multiple communities and wider social, political and historical contexts.
As a challenge to this, the current research looks to the networks of QTPOC activist groups across the UK to understand how QTPOC autonomously address lack of social support, negotiate multiple intersectional identities and address the intersectional experiences of racism, queer phobia and transphobia. The research also seeks to complicate understandings of race, gender and sexuality as vectors of identity/subjectivity and oppression by drawing critical race theory, black feminist theory and queer theory into critical psychology and in developing a queerly raced hermeneutic phenomenological framework in order to gain a richer analysis of the intersectional experiences of queer and trans people of colour.