December 1st 2023- ‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ Symposium

Registration is now open for ‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’, a one-day online symposium hosted by the British Society for Literature and Science and the University of Oxford. Taking place via Microsoft Teams on Friday 01 December 2023, from 09:00 to 18:40 GMT, the symposium is free, open to all, and encouraging of participation from postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and early-career researchers (ECRs). Programme and tickets available via our Eventbrite page. 

This symposium seeks to foster conversations about a wide range of topics relevant to queer  ecology across the field of literature and science, medicine, and technology. We also extend Barri J. Gold’s invitation to reconsider ‘nature as nature’ to imagining ways of relating to, engaging with, knowing, and representing the environment that do not reproduce the established anthropocentric, technocapitalist, petrocultural, heteronormative, cisgender, ableist, colonial models.

‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ opens with a doodle workshop on creating lichen patterns led by Immy Smith (visual artist & head of pencil hoarding) and Maria Christodoulou (biostatistician & keeper of random numbers), exploring how the non- binary nature of lichen symbiotic communities helps us to challenge what we think we know, and to see beyond artificially imposed categories and relationships. The symposium also includes an interdisciplinary roundtable on anticolonialism and queer ecology, foregrounding issues of race and colonialism. Confirmed roundtable participants include: Dr Sneha Krishnan (University of Oxford), Dr Lara Choksey (University College London),  Dr Rachel Murray (University of Bristol), and the writer, filmmaker, and storyteller Tracy Assing.

‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ is co-organised by Drs Laura E. Ludtke (she/her), Joshua Phillips (he/him), and Martina Astrid Rodda (they/them).