it's been a lot of fun helping to organise the next Beyond Radical Network workshop; still time to register

Our first Queer Ecologies panel, 'Land' is about to start, with papers from Sam Solomon & Natalia Cecire and Sneha Krishnan

'Are mushrooms queer?', bookended by Barbie, highlighted the cis/purity narratives that the 'mycological turn' can bring with it, 'as if the turn to the natural world authorises a kind of literalism with regard to so-called sex'.

'Queer girls in dangerous tropical gardens' looked at the Women's Christian College in Chennai, looking to the colonial attempt to 'enclose' girlhood that the gardens represented and ultimately failed to achieve.

Fabulous and fascinating encounter with the St Andrews Botanic garden facilitated by Roxani Krystalli. Thinking about knowledge and pleasure and the senses…and smelling the flowers!

Yesterday we finished our day with a fabulous botanical garden encounter led by Roxani Krystalli

Sadly I didn’t get a picture yesterday when this bird corpse was still laid out perfectly — This is in St Andrews, Scotland. What would have scavenged the bird but left the skeleton so intact?

This morning, we're starting off our 'Beyond Land: Boundaries and Spills' panel with Matt Barlow on Queering Monsoon Wetness, drawing our attention to the ways in which boundaries between land and water have reinforced heteropatriarchal capitalism and focussing in on Kochi.

Next, Hannah Boast gave a paper after her hit article 'Theorizing the Gay Frog', reflecting on its afterlives and the inflammatory effect of stating that the frog 'instantiates racialised and sexualised anxieties about boundary crossing'.

Hannah Boast also asks the important question, 'is this the time to embrace toxic queerness?'

Lastly, Ariadne Collins spoke on the political ecology of atmospheres, taking the Guyana shield as an example of the ways in which atmospheres and weather(ing) form 'particular material engulfing situations' implicated in material and colonial histories.

Our panel and knowing and unknowability has just finished. First we had Grace Garland analysing the rhetoric of climate science, identifying 'chronic equivocation' in science's attempts to communicate data in an apolitical way. Garland advocates for a Plumwoodian turn, instead.

Next we had Kat Hunfeld with queer ecosocialist notes on rewilding, using Andreas Malm's argument for keeping binaries within our critique, rather than arguing for unlimited entanglement, so that we can be cognisant of human intentionality and its effects on the environment.

feeling nourished by our 2 day workshop on 'Queering Elements, Ecologies, Environments', of which this walk in St Andrews Botanic Garden led by Roxani Krystalli + beach reading group with rowan lear and Nat Walpole were highlights; follow Beyond Radical Network for more on what we talked about

Late to this news. What a devastating blow to the infrastructure for queer scholarship in the UK. Please tag us in petitions and protests!