- Convenors:
-
Ali Graham
(University of Edinburgh)
Priyanshu Thapliyal (University of Edinburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
Each presenter will orally deliver their paper/presentation, followed by a panel Q&A with the audience chaired by the conveners.
Long Abstract
Political ecology and queer ecology share a longstanding commitment to foregrounding marginalised voices, relationalities, and practices, in pursuit of environmental and social justice. Political ecologists focus on political players, interests, and socio-economic arrangements acting in congruence to create winners and losers in environmental governance regimes (Robbins, 2012). Meanwhile, queer ecologists work with the instabilities, excesses, and purported ‘losers’ of hegemonic regimes, telling stories as way of ‘queering’ normative binaries and modes of thinking (Mortimer-Sandiland & Erikson, 2010). They are guided by ‘queer figures’ (Patrick, 2014) - human and more-than-human - that transgress socio-political boundaries via their embodiments and relations.
Considering their overlapping aims to unsettle hegemonies and imagine otherwise, we believe a more thorough and wide-ranging cross-disciplinary dialogue will strengthen the analytical power of both political and queer ecology. Political ecologists have already begun engaging with queer theories (Gandy, 2012; Patrick, 2014; Shillington & Murnaghan, 2016) but have predominantly focused on terrestrial and urban environments. In this panel, we seek papers that extend attention towards the politics of queer world-makings in non-urban, watery, and amphibious environments e.g., farmlands, forests, wetlands, rivers, and oceans. Within such spaces, there is still much scope to tell stories that further develop and nuance the critiques of political ecologists by centring queer political imaginaries. To this end, ‘queer’ could be engaged as non-normative human-nonhuman relations, practices, and modes of being, rather than solely as identity and essence (Seymour, 2020).
We look forward to creating space for researchers working at these intersections to discuss, debate, and explore synergies that may help foster radical ethics and hopeful futures for inhabiting the world otherwise.
We are particularly interested in submissions that engage with:
Liminal/boundary environments e.g., peri-urban, foothills, ecotones, forest-edges, estuaries, wastelands
Transgressive animals and plants e.g., non-natives, pests, invasives, strays
Queer/ing methods e.g., arts-based methods, queer epistemologies/ontologies
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
A photo-essay on queer, migrant, toxic labour in a peri-urban landscape transformed into a carbon offset plantation. It traces how knotweed, Sitka spruce and chemical policing expose extractive ecologies and contested rights to remain.
Presentation long abstract
I live on a peri-urban edge: isolated lanes and hedges, yet fifteen minutes from a supermarket. Say ‘countryside’ and judgement follows – either privileged retreat or neglected backwater. Each year I enter these fields wearing a coverall and respirator, spraying Roundup on knotweed, nettles and burrs; injecting stems marked for elimination. This season the surrounding land was sold to an absentee investor for a spruce plantation to generate airline carbon credits. Sheep have gone; in their place, enclosure 2.0: high fences exclude deer and rabbits reclassified as pests; native vegetation slated for ploughing; soil turned to erase so-called weeds. Long-standing coexistence becomes contamination.
This photo/video essay with spoken reflection traces how carbon finance reorganises peri-urban life through purity, extraction and exclusion. As a queer, migrant, disabled resident, I am neither neutral nor outside: I police with chemicals while my body is governed by conditional permission. The work draws on queer and political ecology (Haraway, Puar, Seymour) to attend to contamination, entanglement and misfit as sites of knowledge. Knotweed I must eradicate and Sitka I must welcome expose the same calculus of admissibility: life valued for utility, not relation. The peri-urban setting matters: it unsettles rural/urban and rich/poor binaries, showing how speculative climate fixes fold everyday landscapes and bodies into green extractivism.
Rather than asking how to remove invasives, this work asks what their persistence, and the toxic labours arrayed against them, makes thinkable. It proposes invasive futures as sites of relation and responsibility, practising life together beyond metrics of permission.
Presentation short abstract
Grounded in ignorance studies and amphibious ontologies, Littoral Political Ecology queers terrestrial political ecology by foregrounding the lived experiences of fishers as they negotiate uncertainty and collaborate with more-than-human agents to contest state-sponsored erasures.
Presentation long abstract
I offer Littoral Political Ecology (LPE) as a tentative southern conceptual framework that emerges from reflections on the fisher struggle for the Ennore–Pulicat wetlands in Chennai, India. Grounded in amphibious ontologies, LPE extends political ecology's emerging engagement with uncertainty, risk and vulnerability in the littoral by examining power and the state's spatial visions using ignorance as a lens. Rather than denoting absence, ignorance here refers to the strategic production of non-knowledge to erase, desiccate, and flatten littoral worlds —through withheld measurements, cartographic erasures and the abstraction of lived spaces, regulatory ambiguity, and technocratic framings of uncertainty. By revealing the ignorance tactics underlying the state’s mode of spatial production and foregrounding how fishers negotiate uncertainty, precarity and state-sponsored erasures, LPE does not merely deconstruct capitalist designs, it makes visible the insurrectionary acts of resistance that assert ways of living within, against and beyond capitalism. Amidst warming seas and intensifying Blue Economy ambitions, the littoral becomes not only a site of conflict but also a method for theorising how coastal worlds are governed, inhabited, and contested. Learning from the struggles and cosmology of Tamil artisanal fishers, LPE offers a southern lens for reimagining coastal ecologies amid rising oceanic pressures.
Presentation short abstract
This work engages wind and the banshee as two queer objects from which to consider the position(ing) of F/folklore and the audio(-visual) within the academy. In writing a new cultural geography of wind, this paper develops the ‘windscape’ as methodological intervention and means of scéalaíocht.
Presentation long abstract
This work engages wind and the banshee as two queer objects from which to think expansively about the position(ing) of F/folklore and the audio(-visual) within the academy. This is to advance lively debates on the constitution of ‘academic’ material and broaden extant argumentation concerning the inclusion and validity of soundscape as both method and output. F/folk and the audio(-visual), as ‘modes’ of knowledge, continue to be relegated to the peripheries of the Western intellectual tradition. Attempting to undo this ‘ontological freezing’, this work rejects the neo-Kantianism structuring the Anglo-American academy that protects the dominance of textuality. As methodological intervention, then, this paper critically interrogates and problematises the normative use of the wind muff / shield. Attempting to apprehend the environment in its ‘chaos’ and ‘excess’, it seeks to undo (and deconstruct) the epistemological silencing and sanitisation of wind otherwise. The development of novel ‘windscapes’ works to this end; in writing a new cultural geography of wind, the anthropocentric is destabilised by attending to the interconnected agencies of the more-than-human. This allows for the conceptualisation of new ways of apprehending and knowing (Irish) landscapes, emerging from multiple and mutable experiences of dwelling. Importantly, these are landscapes in which lurk serious traces of dispossession by the British; this more-than-textual work seeks to articulate those strange encounters overflowing from the Atlantic Irish coast, testifying to the centrality of scéalaíocht, story-telling, and defending an Oral tradition carried with, in, and through the wind.
Presentation short abstract
Queering political ecology through engagement with seaweeds, this paper explores how marine and coastal environments enable queer multispecies relations that contest heteronormative and extractivist ocean governance and offer alternative world-makings.
Presentation long abstract
Intertidal zones are liminal spaces where land and sea meet, and where lives, identities, and categories slip out of fixed form. Entering this dynamic environment through encounters with its dwellers, this paper brings political ecology into conversation with queer ecology by tracing seaweed as a queer and unruly figure: neither plant nor animal, neither fully oceanic nor terrestrial, celebrated as sustainable superfood yet dismissed as coastal waste. Beginning with a nineteenth-century poem declaring “Call us not weeds, we are ocean’s gay flowers,” I explore how seaweeds have long been entangled with queer desire and refuge. Engagement with archival materials – including Victorian women’s seaweed collections and writings – reveals how intertidal zones once served as safe spaces for women and queer people seeking to evade scientific exclusion and heteronormative domesticity. Drawing on several months of phenomenological (auto)ethnography conducted in the UK, the paper then explores how contemporary encounters with seaweed rehearse and reimagine these histories. As oceans become increasingly militarised and discovered as underexploited resource frontiers, seaweeds are subjected to novel forms of capitalist extraction – from industrial aquaculture to their mobilisation as climate-change mitigation tools. Against these extractivist logics, queer multispecies relations such as foraging, diving, dwelling, and making art with algae, open alternative world-makings grounded in care, attentiveness, and more-than-human intimacy. Reading the intertidal zone as a queer space and seaweeds as queer companion species, the paper argues that such relations contest heteronormative and extractivist ocean governance and offer new conceptual pathways for bridging queer and political ecologies.
Presentation short abstract
Contemporary Scottish storytellers are engaged in an explicitly transgressive exercise in critical disorientation, reimagining shared cultural histories and rewriting centuries-old folktales to center modern sociopolitical concerns related to power, identity, injustice, and more-than-human selfhood.
Presentation long abstract
For half a millennium, the selkie — a supernatural being, part-seal and part-human — has held totemic status within Scottish storytelling communities. As a creature that explicitly challenges and transgresses culturally-reinforced binaries — human/animal, land/sea, surfaces/depths, living/dead — the folkloric selkie is often subjected to acts of extreme violence, degradation, imprisonment, and killing at the hands of human characters.
Oral storytelling represents a particularly adaptive form of cultural expression, with audiences and storytellers engaged in rituals of narrative co-creation, applying new textures, values, and morals to the tales in real time (Zipes 1997). In recent years, young Scottish storytellers have drawn on Sara Ahmed’s (2006) theories of queer phenomenology as an (often explicitly) transgressive exercise in critical dis/orientation (Turnbull and Platt 2022), reimagining shared cultural histories and rewriting centuries-old folktales to center modern sociopolitical concerns related to power, identity, injustice, and more-than-human biopolitics. This presentation explores these recent structural, tonal, and narrative evolutions within Scottish storytelling communities, examining:
(i) The contemporary queering of selkie tales — reframing rigid binaries into watery, relational spectrums, embracing “the quivering tension of the in-between” (Neimanis 2012).
(ii) The transition from liminality to marginality — how threshold-crossing bodies, geographies, and identities are subjected to objectification, erasure, and carnivalization (Alaimo 2008; Shields 2013).
(iii) The grey seal as pest, poltergeist, and posterchild — how the seal’s historically transgressive relationship with human settlements has resulted in centuries of cultural fascination and distrust, including wide-scale culls and ongoing debates over the “killability” of seals (Lambert 2002; Haraway 2008).
Presentation short abstract
This study examines how LGBTQIA+ and environmental movements in Turkey build solidarity under authoritarianism, showing through a queer ecology lens how their intersection generates new forms of resistance to neoliberal and patriarchal structures.
Presentation long abstract
In Turkey, the LGBT movement emerged within the broader context of the Green movement, which gained visibility in the late 1970s.This study explores the intersection of LGBTQIA+ and environmental movements in Turkey, focusing on how these marginalized groups, both targeted by the Erdoğan regime since 2002, build solidarity to resist state repression and neoliberal policies. The central question driving this research asks: What motivates the LGBTQIA+ movement’s engagement with environmental activism, and how does this intersection shape new forms of solidarity under authoritarian conditions?
Applying a queer ecology framework, the study examines the connections between sexuality, environmentalism, and social justice, moving beyond essentialist ecofeminist narratives. It explores whether LGBTQIA+ involvement in environmental activism stems from ideological commitments to social justice or pragmatic strategies to navigate political repression. Using a narrative feminist lens, the study captures activists' lived experiences through semi-structured interviews, centering marginalized voices and linking personal stories to broader socio-political contexts.
Findings reveal that environmental activism often serves as a relatively safer space for political dissent, perceived as more socially "legitimate" than LGBTQIA+ activism. Yet, this engagement goes beyond pragmatism; activists also embrace a holistic struggle addressing interconnected forms of oppression, including ecocide, homophobia, and economic injustice. The study underscores how queer environmentalism in Turkey challenges neoliberal and patriarchal structures, fostering coalition-building across marginalized communities and linking local resistance with transnational movements. This research highlights the resilience and strategic adaptability of these groups in resisting systemic injustices.
Presentation long abstract
For centuries, a fantasy of mastery and moral order, rooted in Calvinist traditions of discipline and stewardship has been at the core of Dutch water management (Schama, 1987; van de Ven, 2003). The Delta Works embody this infrastructural sublime (Kaika, 2005), in which floods appear as divine judgment and reclaimed land as virtue. The rise of ecological restoration and the re-opening of the Harinvliet sluice introduced new conceptualizations of nature, in which organisms, sediments, tides, and even metaphysical forces acquired relational and moral value. The article mobilizes the infrastructural sublime as a framework for understanding how fantasies of security give way to a desire for a return to Edenic naturescapes within tidal landscapes. Liminal environments such as estuaries and tidal zones, in turn, generate transgressive agencies: invasive crayfish undermining dikes, migratory fish defying infrastructural limits, sediment and salinity behaving unpredictably, complicating such binary oppositions. These boundary-crossing beings destabilize imaginaries of anthropocentri infrastructure, leaving space for queer ecologies that foreground fluidity.
To further articulate these dynamics, the article develops a multibeing approach that treats organisms, infrastructures, and metaphysical presences, spirits, forces, inherited cosmologies, as co-constitutive actors in coastal worlds. Through discourse analysis of policy documents, scientific publications, technical reports, and national and regional media, combined with affective-historical ethnography of the communities surrounding the sluice, the study shows how the Haringvliet sluice has become a site where competing imaginaries of security, decay, and cohabitation unfold.
Presentation short abstract
Based on research at Teat(r)o Oficina, São Paulo, the paper tells the story of how more-than human acts by a river, a fallen tree and a marginalized black and queer community in the neighborhood prefigure a socially and environmentally just place-making countering gentrification and urban design.
Presentation long abstract
Taking the point of the departure in the avantgarde and queer theatre, Teat(r)o Oficina in São Paulo, the paper seeks to formulate a queer place making practice that works with marginalised voices, relationalities for social and environmental and social justice in an beyond the city. How can artistic practices, performance and embodiment help voicing minor gestures and marginalized voices, for instance of the black minority and Quilomboque heritage in the neighborhood, and how does these voices intersect with the queer ecologies surrounding Teat(r)o Oficina and their performance practice? To what extent can the queer and minor ecologies of the tree, of performance and the sowing of seeds and gardening inform a place-making practice? Through environmental storytelling where more-than human performances of a tree, the subaltern river underneath the territory, the theatre architecture, and the neighborhood community is enacted, the presentation will show how queer ecologies can prefigure a truly ecological place-making. Queer performance and environmental performance acts is in this sense a counter movement to the placemaking practices carried out by the municipality of São Paulo and the real estate owner of the land. While the subaltern may not be able to speak (Spivak) into the hegemonic discourses of current urban place making, the presentation argues that the subaltern understood as the more-than human ecologies of the river running beneath, marginalized and queer communities may be able to act and embody a socially and environmentally just place-making.