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.
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
Anthologies to Save the Planet
Feminist Botany For the Age of Man
More-than-Human/ities: Interdisciplinary Collaborations, Multiagential Worlds - EUC-CEH Research Seminar Series 2025-26
This online seminar series explores leading edge research in the interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities (EH) by bringing together faculty members, early career researchers, and PhD students from York University and the University of Bristol for a series of online discussions about concerns of interest to both institutions and to the larger, global EH community.
In recent years, EH scholarship has focused increasingly on the world as a more-than-human assemblage of agencies, considering diverse forms of life and nonlife – animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, viruses, minerals, soils, waters, and matter more generally – as collectively shaping past, present, and future ecopolitical relations. Drawing on methodologically innovative and interdisciplinary practices – including especially arts-based research – this seminar series highlight the synergies between EUC and CEH both to demonstrate the exciting work currently underway at both institutions in more-than-human EH research and to create ongoing collaborative relations between them.
https://www.yorku.ca/euc/events-euc/euc-ceh-research-seminar-series-2025-26/
Wild Kin: A Queer Ecologies Symposium
Join us for the last series of presentations by leading thinkers in the field of Queer Ecology in today's symposium exploring how queer ecology—and the arts—can reimagine kinship, healing, and ecological belonging in response to intensifying anti-trans, homophobic, and gender-restrictive legislation.
These interdisciplinary conversations will address speculative botany, queer intimacy, multispecies kinship, and grief; with Cate Sandilands, Morris Fox, Hailey Guzik, Abi Hodson. Organized by Aaron McIntosh (Associate Professor, Studio Arts) and FOFA Gallery, with support from CISSC, the Queering Nature Studies Research Working Group, and the Textiles & Materiality Cluster for The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO)
Human Entanglements with More-Than-Human-Worlds - CIIS Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion Program
2024 Religion and Ecology Summit, Day 1 - April 8, 2024 - Morning Panel
Cate Sandilands presenting "Urticacious Intimacies and Queer Ecologies" with Patricia Kaishian: “Myceliating the Emotional Space,” Michelle Marzullo: “Unforeseen Lines of Force: Queer Kinship, Climate Ethics,” Margaret Robinson: “Kinship with Other Animals in Mi’kmaw Spirituality,” and Cleo Woelfle-Hazard: “Queer Fire and Flood: Collective ritual in more-than-human worlds”. Moderated by Andrew Scanlan, PhD Student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at CIIS
Bea´s Garden: Restorying the (M)Anthropocene - Cornelia Goethe Centrum - June 2023
In her prologue to their dialogical text Through Vegetal Being (2016), Luce Irigaray writes to Michael Marder that “coexistence with vegetal being – I could almost say: this vegetal existence – keeps me alive and secretly goes with my words” (7). Marder responds with a similar sentiment: “at times forgetting myself, I would be able to find the other and, thanks to this discovery, cultivate a richer relation to the vegetal world” (114). In the burgeoning field of critical plant studies, the idea of intimate encounters with vegetality – in plants, and ultimately in ourselves – is a key theme, not least because it suggests the possibility of a more expansive and relational practice of being human with which to counteract some of the depredations of the (M)Anthropocene.
The idea of vegetal encounter as a challenge to Man is not, however, a new one. In addition to stories from many world traditions involving the metamorphosis of people, especially women, into plants (and sometimes back again), plants also emerge, especially in 19th century gothic and science fiction literatures, as monstrous creatures who bring a decidedly transgressive embodiment into plant-human relations. As scholars of “plant horror” have pointed out, these monstrous plants, in their uncanny combination of animacy and alterity, also challenge – and not in an intentionally positive way – ideas of human supremacy and mastery.
“Bea’s Garden” is a small, experimental research-creation project that takes some of these older vegetal literary resources and turns them to the task of restorying the (M)Anthropocene. Specifically, it takes up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gothic fiction “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844). In this presentation, I will investigate the allegorical conversation about plants, gardens, scientific experimentation, colonial botany, gender, sex, and futurity going on in the text itself, and will then proceed to a reading and discussion of my short story, “Bea’s Garden,” which rewrites Hawthorne’s story as a queer, feminist speculation.
Loving the Difficult? - Cogut Institute for the Humanities - October 2022
Scotch broom (Cytisus scoparius) is currently one of the most loathed exotic invasive plants on the west coast of North America. As part of a larger inquiry into entanglements with invasive plants, this talk explores the ways broom’s history in the region is inseparable from ongoing colonialization of the land it occupies, including both the infrastructural and industrial development that facilitated broom’s spread and the more recent settler-colonial institutional and aesthetic preference for indigenous plants. The presentation asks if institutional broom eradication strategies aren’t part of a settler colonial “move to innocence” that attempts botanical erasure of ongoing histories of colonialism, often ignoring Indigenous philosophies that may not be as focused on exotic invasive species as they are on the settler-capitalist relations in which plants and people are jointly embedded. The presentation ends by asking what noninnocent settler responsibilities might be in, with, and to Scotch broom and other exotic invasive plants as part of a more life-affirming, attentive practice of decolonization, one that foregrounds relations with Indigenous peoples more than it does the eradication of nonindigenous plants.
Event recorded on October 13, 2022. Presented by the Cogut Institute’s Initiative for Environmental Humanities at Brown (EHAB).
Stories are critical to understanding and responding to climate change. On the one hand, our collective imaginations are shaped by dominant, inherited narrative conventions; as public climate stories rely almost entirely on large-scale, apocalyptic tropes, many people are uncertain how to respond to them in their everyday lives. On the other hand, stories can help us make shared emotional and relational sense of the complexity of large-scale ecological and social transformations. Works of climate-related fiction, poetry, and memoir thus present a powerful cultural resource with which to encounter, collectively, the many social and ecological issues that climate change presents. They connect climate change to the personal and social entanglements of our intimate experiences; they also connect us to the larger relations of injustice and inequality that powerfully shape our conditions of experience and response. The “Storying Climate Change” project focuses on developing a repertoire of “small” climate stories: works of fiction, poetry, and memoir that begin in intimate experiences of place, relationship, and history, and that invite others to share their own stories, with the aim of developing a narrative climate change repertoire that is deeply attentive to the particularities of place, relationship, and social justice. This talk focuses on storying climate change in the Salish Sea, and includes perspectives from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts as presented in the edited anthology, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin Press, 2019). Including the project convenor and editor, Catriona Sandilands, and contributors Lauren Magner and Andrew Simon, the talk will include an overview of the project, readings from the interdisciplinary anthology, and conversation about climate change stories in the Salish Sea, the region in which the project was born.
Cate will be joined by two of the contributors to Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times : Lauren Magner and Andrew Simon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCWmqhZ0FKM