Is Climate Change Only Meteorological
In cities, plants are our intimate companions whether or not we notice them. Some urban plant intimacies are cherished and encouraged to flourish; others are strictly policed, even outlawed. In this webinar, I will tell two stories about mulberries and intimacy to illustrate why we should think about plants as biopolitical subjects, and also why we should think about botanical intimacies as important sites of both critical feminist/queer inquiry and restorative relationship in the Anthropocene.
Lecture delivered in September 2021 for the online series “Entanglements” at the Environmental Humanities Center (CLUE+) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Queering Nature
Listen to a panel conversation as we celebrate queerness and discuss its relationship with nature! The assembled thinkers, conservationists, and activists explore how their communities and organizations are making space for the LGBTQIA++ community in the outdoors.
This presentation was delivered for the National Audubon Society in 2021
Botanically Queer
Plants have been profoundly queer players in the modern project of describing "life" for ethical and political consideration. From their taxonomic destabilizations of colonial order in the eighteenth century to their current questionings concerning agency in recent posthumanist discourses, plants demand that we think about living, being, and becoming in ways that interrupt anthropocentric and heteronormative figurings of ethics, agency, futurity, and life in general. In this presentation, Catriona Sandilands, an internationally recognized scholar in both queer ecologies and plant studies, will speak about "botanical queerness" with an eye to thinking through the complexity of humans' relations to plants beyond habitual environmentalist modes of address. Plants are not simply objects of human concern; they offer up modes of being. becoming, living, and futurity that have been overlooked in many more animal-centric accounts, and that may serve as the basis of a more critical, queer, and ecological understanding of life in relation to power.
This lecture was delivered at Columbia University in 2014
Queer Ecological Justice
We are delighted to be joined by two highly influential scholars of queer ecologies. In this reading and discussion group with Dr Neel Ahuja and Professor Cate Sandilands, we will discuss how their engagements with queer theory and practice have influenced their approaches to ecological justice and vice versa. We will explore the shifts in their work between the micropolitics of interspecies entanglements to the planetary scale of environmental destruction. Ahuja and Sandilands push back against the fetishization of nature to think through nuanced temporalities of life and death amidst commodity capitalism, ecotourism, and the persistence of racism and colonial attitudes in environmentalist theory and praxis.
An event organised in March 2022 by the Global Conversations Towards Queer Social Justice research network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge University
Mulberries: A Biopolitical Love Story
Join Catriona Sandilands (York University, Toronto) on this adventure into the complex and fascinating worlds of plants.
Sandilands is particularly interested in people’s relationships with botanical others, including shifting understandings of what plants are and what they can do. In this time of accelerating environmental and social change—which is also a time of widening inequalities—Sandilands draws the insights of feminist thought and practice into this conversation to ask: what might we learn, what new approaches and possibilities might become possible, through a feminist botany?
This event took place in the Hallstrom Theatre, Australian Museum, Sydney, on 12 July 2018.
Feminist, queer, anticolonial and antiracist scholars and activists have variously argued that environmental change is not only - or even primarily - about climatological facts, but about social and cultural ones. Given the intersection of the crises we currently face, how should we understand a term like “environment” today?
Keynote at the Community Garden Festival in February 2022 organized by the Seed Box at Linköping University
Four editors discuss how anthologies can be an effective form of collective action and protest in face of the climate crisis.
Panel discussion for the 2021 WORD Vancouver Festival
