This chapter provides the nuanced and non-essentialist understandings of diaspora that rely on transnational and intersectional approaches to provide research strategies for studying the complexities of diasporic life. Scholars of queer and gender studies have offered numerous empirical examples of the complexities and challenges of diasporic life. Influential thinkers like Paul Gilroy and James Clifford have paved the way for a decidedly non-essentialist understanding of diaspora, which focuses on migrants' cross-border linkages, flows and circulation, and practices of establishing social and symbolic ties. The challenges posed by methodological nationalism, the ethnic lens and ethnic groupism, and the heteronormative bias in empirical research in the field make it necessary to develop research strategies that increase researchers' sensitivity and reflexivity when studying cross-border diasporic phenomena. The chapter concludes with a closer look at the need to deconstruct the 'groupist' and fixed connotations of the concept of diaspora.