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

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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