The seminar will discuss entanglements – existing and possible linkages – between queer/feminist environmental humanities, and conceptualisation and practices of anti-extractivist struggles, with the focus on the European North. New materialist practitioners in their multiple genealogies have advanced radical theories of agentiality, thus remoulding the territories of ontology, epistemology and ethics for posthumanist and more-than-human worldings, while holding onto queer and feminist ethico-political commitments. The implications of new materialist onto-epistemology, especially in its radically relational and immanent variations, for environmental politics and, specifically, resistance to capitalist extraction and accumulation, are ongoing debates, with which this seminar engages. Extractivist industry as well as policy-making are predominantly structured upon a modern patriarchal ‘inferioritisation’ of other-than-human earth, essentially classified as inert matter to be ‘resourced’. Many thinkers within new materialist constellation and their kin— including ecofeminism, queer ecology and material ecocriticism—are dedicated to upending this static vision of the earth and reweaving relations of care with it, with complex ‘re(con)figurations’ of vulnerability, toxicity, exposure, environmental violence, responsibility and accountability.

Many of these are core concerns of anti-extractivist politics, however, environmental movements in the European North at the moment seem not to explicitly engage with work with new materialist vocabulary. Meaningful transpositions in either direction require work, listening and careful exchange. Starting from the land and current anti-extractivist practices, the seminar will attempt to diffractively map the border zones of touch between minoritarian ecological practices and new materialist environmental humanities, brought together by the issues of anti-extractivism. The point of this analysis is not to explain one with the other, but to outline less visible genealogies and conjuctures that open up to flourishing intra-actions for multispecies justice. This diffractive analytics will, “once again”, look at the constituent “we” of queer/feminist materialist thinking in EH key, and contribute to deterritorialising it.

In shared conversation with Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Josef Barla, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Felicity Colman, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Silvia Federici, Magdalena Górska, Peta Hinton, Tara Mehrabi, Astrida Neimanis, Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Praba Pilar, Val Plumwood, Elizabeth Povinelli, Marietta Radomska, Catriona Sandilands, Whitney Stark, Kim Tallbear, Kathrin Thiele, Zoe Todd, Nancy Tuana, Alex Wilson, Cecilia Åsberg, and multiple earth others.

Watch the seminar here: