about

I am a queer eco-social researcher, writer, poet, educator, editor and relational practitioner. I study how binary, hierarchical and extractivist ways of knowing and being shape our minds, bodies and relationships and what it takes to undo these injuries of colonization. As a researcher, I study how humans of modernity become separated from our being, each other, our nonhuman relations and metabolic life itself, and how we learn to heal. As a teacher, I work with ontological pedagogies that touch the deep, sedimented and normalized ways we sense, make sense, communicate, bear bodies, organize living together, and grieve and desire and love. As a writer, I apprentice with spiritual-political artistries of language that constellate realities pried apart, provide portals to queer existence, stimulate the senses to synthesize, and transmute dehydrated meaning into life’s erotic flow. As a relational practitioner, I try to embody courageously queer life-promoting love with/in all my relations. I see de-institutionalizing (re-rooting and re-routing) desire, expanding intimacies and fortifying more-than-human relational ecologies as essential for livable futures and as art-life practices of cosmological care.

I was a university professor of both sociology and education for twenty-five years before moving into collective and land-based eco-social and artistic scholarship, stewardship, organizing and pedagogy. My academic backgrounds are in critical philosophy, decolonial and queer theory; relational and transfeminist philosophies; the politics of knowledge, science and education; transdisciplinary research and radical pedagogy. I am now making work at the intersections of decolonial epistemology, queer and trans ecologies, queer metabolic intimacies and embodied politics, relational ontology, de-institutionalizing modern/colonial sensibility, somatic poetic practice and spiritual-political pedagogy.

I co-direct the Oregon (US-based) Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA), steward SSoMA’s Queer Imagination and Liberation Lab (QUILL) and am a member of the affiliated Our Bodhi Project. I also co-direct the Beyond Form Creative Writing platform. I am based between Lisbon and Avô, Portugal, and collaborate making home and community with Queerida, a queer and trans-led land-based project in a valley between the Serra do Açor and Serra da Estrela mountains.

I was born into a lineage of mixed white Anglo-European settler-colonial ancestry and grew up in the mid-Atlantic United States on the traditional land of the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke peoples. I hold a BSc in Education from the University of Delaware (1994), an MA in Sociology from George Mason University (1998) and a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2005). Between 1996 and 2022, I held academic posts in Sociology and Education at George Mason University (1997), the American University of Central Asia (1998-2000, 2003), the London School of Economics and Political Science (2003-2004), the Open University (2005-2006), Kingston University (2007-2009), Aston University (2009-2012), the University of Lincoln (2012-2017) and the University of Nottingham (2017-2023). Prior to this, I worked in anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist, popular and cooperative education in early years, school, youth, museum/curatorial, public pedagogical, and anarchist/autonomist settings, co-running the Social Science Centre, an England-based popular and higher education cooperative, from 2011-2019. From 2018-2022, I was a member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective.

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