Short Abstract

This panel seeks to explore queer spaces (built and peripheries) in West Africa by bringing into dialogue issues on queer resilience, survival, and agency with a multidisciplinary approach by situating it in the larger discourse of gender, sexuality, the built environment and climate justice.

Long Abstract

In the last decade, there has been significant increase in studies about queer identities, expressions, and repressions across the African continent. Scholars have investigated how queer visibility has been remarked and contested in academia, policy and practice (Avilez 2020; Onanuga 2021; 2023; Ikpo 2023). Different studies also assert that spaces are important in the context of sexual oppression (Sbicca 2012) and certainly contribute to aiding queer visibility – whether physically or psychologically. Catterall and Azzouz (2021) note the danger in claustrophobic, enclosed designs for queer people and advocate for LGBTIQ+ inclusiveness in the design of public spaces. To this end this panel seeks to interrogate issues on queer spaces and its intersection with climate justice, urban inequalities, LGBTQIA+ activism and raise questions on who gets and how one gets to inhabit spaces most especially how gender, sexuality, class, mobility, and other inequalities determine access to safe physical and social environments. We ask how are hostile and exclusionary environments resisted? What does West African and African environmental inclusivity contribute to global justice movements especially when we consider the ways queer West Africans produce knowledge and disruptive strategies, as well as different forms of resistance that can reshape the discourse on LGBTQIA+ justice precarious spaces? How might climate change and exclusions in West African built environment intensify existing forms of queer oppression? How can queer West Africans contest and transform spaces of oppression and environmental degradation to safe havens?

Keywords: Queer spaces; Safe spaces; environmental degradation; environmental inclusivity; environmental justice

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