Jaz is a postgraduate researcher with the Global Sustainability Institute at ARU, working on the transdisciplinary project 'Queering ecology: a transdisciplinary exploration of LGBTQIA+ (queer) perspectives and engagements within nature and ecological science'.
Global Sustainability Institute
The aim of the project is to explore the intersections and tensions of the liberation-knowledge projects of queering and decoloniality and explore how these can be applied to ecological science, to develop regenerative understandings and practices in this field.
Over recent decades, work within science and technology studies has shown that the natural sciences are mobilised to legitimise social structures and systems. Simultaneously, they reproduce the toxicities, processes and assumptions of these social structures within their knowledge-generation practices. Biology, ecology and natural history play particularly important roles in underpinning these structures. These subjects are constructed predominantly via anthropocentric, heteronormative, anglo-centric and euro-centric perspectives. This elitism may be linked with the low levels of engagement that underprivileged members of society have with nature and ecology, which only furthers the implementation of oppressive systemic practices.
Provisional questions of this project include:
What does "queering" mean in the context of ecology?
How is "queering" currently being applied by ecologists?
What are the values, contributions and limits of queering as a tool?
What would decolonial queering look like in practice?
Supervisors: