About
The Queer Ecologies Research Collective is a mutable organization for cross-pollination and community-building around the trans-disciplinary framework of queer ecology. Like any body, the QuERC is constituted by its participants—each gathering or project since 2023 provides new opportunities for an emergent collective to form, with the goal of generating knowledge and experimental methods for collective research. [see PROJECTS]
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, but 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 rather 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