I am a queer eco-social writer, researcher, educator, editor, organizer and relational activist. I have a background in critical and queer theory, politics of knowledge and education, transdisciplinary research and radical pedagogy. I live at the intersections of embodied decolonial learning, spiritual-political queer ecology, somatic poetic arts and radically relational practice and care. My work seeks to expand our collective capacities to live, love and die well together while healing and hospicing wounded and wounding worlds. It focuses on how we undo deeply internalized colonial ways of being to become part(ner)s of life-promoting, more-than-human ecologies. It especially draws on analytical, artistic and embodied methods to deepen capacities for radical relationship. I love playing with languages, pedagogies and curricula that interrupt binary, linear and hierarchical ways of sensing, perceiving, making sense of and organizing our relations with each other and the earth – and that foment curiosity for queer, not-yet-imaginable realities and possibilities.
I was born and grew up in the mid-Atlantic United States, on the traditional land of the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke peoples, to at least nine generations of white Anglo-European ancestry. I am based in England and Portugal. 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). I collaborate with the US-based Our Bodhi political organizing project and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective, and am ongoingly rooted in collective projects of holistic art-life-inquiry. I worked in higher education and academic research from 1996-2022 as a teacher, researcher, mentor, supervisor, administrator, teacher educator, popular educator and activist. I have held professorial 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 and cooperative pedagogies in early years, school, youth, museum/curatorial, public pedagogical, and anarchist/autonomist social center settings. Today, you can find me mainly in queer, spiritual-political and ecological learning projects, theoretical and artistic labs, writing places, and multi-being family-community-kin-making scenarios.
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Sarah Amsler 