‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ BSLS Winter Symposium 2023

‘Imagining Queer Ecologies’ is a one-day online symposium hosted by the British Society for Literature and Science and the University of Oxford taking place 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). Registration opens on Friday 10 November.

Queer ecology offers a potent critical and interpretive approach to exploring the intimacies and interdependencies of literature and science, medicine, and technology. It can also serve as a theoretical framework to challenge what Barri J. Gold identifies as the ‘concept of nature’ developed across the nineteenth century within and beyond the literary and scientific ecosystems in which this concept develops. For instance, how might a consideration of queer ecology together with literature and science encourage us, as Gold exhorts us, to reconsider ‘the dominant way of thinking about what we call our environment, imagining nature as the stage set against which we act and which is ours to do with what we please’?

With this symposium, we seek 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 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), and Dr Rachel Murray (University of Bristol).

Full programme is available here.

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