Intimate Ecologies: A Black Feminist Erotics for Interspecies Un/Worlding

This talk draws on a richly textured landscape of Black feminist; queer and Native theory; visual cultures; postnatural studies and decolonial environmental humanities. Participants will be invited to re-think binary subject positions such as ""the human"" and ""nature"" in a speculative rehearsal of liberatory interspecies futures where, as adrienne maree brown has called for: the pleasure of the most oppressed is centred. In such an un/world, I argue, we can all thrive.

This session offers an introduction to speculative writer, artist and scholar Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone's research and practice: Intimate Ecologies.

Intimate ecologies is a praxis, a way of reading, a methodology for those haunted and heavy with the weight of ancestors, a point of departure from which to speculate. The concept arose out of my need to keep thinking with and working in resistance to climate colonialism, when the threat of despair, of overwhelming and crushing melancholia dragged me under. I needed to queer colonial presentations of human-to-more-than-human relations. I needed to keep thinking and speaking about pleasure, possibility, intimacy, and spirit, the speculative and the still-to-be-imagined futures in which Blackness and the more-than-human are becoming; utilizing what photographer and activist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, in his 1988 text for TEN.8, called “a technique of ecstasy."

We are committed to making our sessions as accessible as possible. If you are unable to pay the full amount for this class, please reach out to us via email at [email protected] and we will provide you with a discount code.