About
The Queer Ecologies Research Collective (QuERC) is a mutable organization dedicated to community-building and cross-pollination around queer ecologies. Like any ecosystem, the QuERC is constituted by its participants, and each gathering or project provides new opportunities for an emergent collective to form, with the goal of generating knowledge and experimental methods for collective research, including retreats, collective publication, cabaret, gallery presentations, and virtual symposia.
Plurality is a guiding logic implicit in the name Queer Ecologies Research Collective. QuERC does not seek to define “queer ecology” as a singular paradigm or critical framework, celebrates multiple possibilities and voices, creating opportunities for them to harmonize. Alex A. Jones and Nicholas di Benedetto are founding co-facilitators and editors, but QuERC is a methodological experiment more than a creator-driven project; it exists via distinct, embodied permutations with collaborators, [see PROJECTS]
Embodied research emerges as a central mode of praxis for QuERC, emphasizing the importance of corporeal experience in knowledge-production, exploring the mutability of the body as a physical and conceptual vessel, and centering the body as an ecological metaphor. Embodiment is asserted to expand and subvert academic models of knowledge-production that tend to objectify, abstract, or erase the body.
Entanglement is a key structural dynamic of queer ecologies. In the foundational work Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), theoretical physicist Karen Barad demonstrates how binaries of “self and other” are, on the quantum level, illusions of space and time. The study of queer ecologies decomposes binary conceptions of the universe—a disruptive and joyful activity that yields a deeply entangled world.
QuERC