2019 | 1 | Announcements, Big Wheels Turning, and a QUE reBoot/reRoot

The last few years have been so intense that I almost forgot I had a website. Whoops! I’ve come back a few announcements and promises of a reBoot/reRoot for Queer Urban Ecologies very soon…ish.

On October 7, 2019, I defended my doctoral dissertation in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario. I’m dr. dp! The dissertation is titled: “‘Bologna is a School of Activism’: TransFeministQueer Autonomy and Urban Spatial Praxis.” It’s a call to thinking and living transversally, a conversation about how knowledge production and political praxis/struggle are dealt with in urban political ecologies and queer geographies, a story of movement and birth, a journey through activist archiving-as-praxis, a memory and a premonition from Atlantide, a dream-mapping of the intersectionality of struggles inspired by Angela Davis speaking in Bologna, and an open-question about the abolition of gender binaries. This work would not have been possible without my comrades in Laboratorio Smaschieramenti, the SomMovimento nazioAnale, and, more recently, CRAAAZi. I’m excited to return to Bologna at the end of this year to deliver a finished dissertation to my comrades and collaborators and to dream of its transfeministqueer afterlives. Endless gratitude also goes to my committee and to the friends, lovers, comrades, family, colleagues, and neighbours everywhere who made this possible. Thank you for teaching me love as a rigorous and radical praxis of collective liberation.

I have also recently started a position as a Lecturer in Gender, Environment, and Activism at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. I’m delighted––and a little overwhelmed––to be back in the classroom this fall. I’m especially grateful to be learning with such amazing students and working with generous, brilliant, and supportive colleagues. I’m teaching two courses this fall: “Gender and Environmental (In)Justice” and “Utopian Visions, Activist Realities.” I’m teaching the latter course as a collective archive-making workshop based on collaborations with members of Laboratorio Smaschieramenti to build an Eccentric Archive of TransFeministQueer Movements. It’s really challenging-good to (re)translate this work into a classroom.

Two other projects are also coming to life/living out loud. The first, Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, launched its first season in June 2019 on the theme of Black Geographies with the support of the Antipode Foundation. Episodes 0 + 1 are already live; Episode 2, which is part two in a two-part series on the work of Dr. Clyde Adrian Woods, will go live very soon. We’ve got some amazing recordings in our little archive and many beautiful heart-minds working on the project…keep listening.

The second, is a soon to be announced co-edited volume linking feminist urban theory and social reproduction. This work is an evolution of an intergenerational feminist/queer collaboration among folx based at York University and the University of Toronto. In 2018, we co-edited a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (paywall/message me) rooted in multi-year conversations and critiques of “planetary urbanization theory.” Our current project, tentatively titled, “A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time,” has, like all of our work, unfolded through conference panels, communal meals, many hours of editing/writing/talking/rigorously hanging out, growing a collective, and generally getting through the grist and the grind of life in the academic industrial complex. We recently reflected on our now five-year collaboration at Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures, the first conference organized as part of the SSHRC Partnership Grant Urbanization, Gender, and the Global South: A Transformative Knowledge Network, run out of the City Institute by the incomparable Linda Peake and an amazing crew of feminists and queers. We’re planning a few sessions at the AAG in Denver in 2020 to reflect on the project. More on that later…

That’s all the news for the good of the union!

Looking forward to much more in the coming year…