For the 2022 issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography, we invite creative work that explores the theme of queer ecologies. By focusing on queer ecologies, we aim to rethink and challenge dominant imaginaries of nature and environment and to imagine alternative ways of being in relation to our bodies, environments, and each other.

We approach ‘queer ecologies’ as a capacious starting point for this practice of reimagining. Here, the word ‘queer,’ begins from, but extends far beyond, matters of gender and sexuality. ‘Queer’ signals an act of unsettling, a disruption of norms and boundaries, a challenging of taken for granted categories and taxonomies. As an epistemological starting point, ‘queer’ signals a viewpoint beyond or outside of dominant perspectives, subjectivities, and worlds. It also signals an attention to identity, to gender and sexuality, but also to race, dis/ability, and other forms of social difference that shape our worlds and relations to each other.

The word ‘ecology’ can be read in the traditional sense, as the sets of relations connecting living beings with their environments. Yet we might also push it further to understand ecology as any web of relations, or as a mode of relationality. Understood as a more generic term, ecology thus tunes our attention to a far greater diversity of relations among bodies, spaces, and environments. We encourage submissions that engage environmental and ecological issues in the more traditional sense, as well as work that transposes ecological and relational thinking to other spheres.

What work might these terms accomplish when taken together? What kinds of productive tensions, ambiguities, and synergies exist between them? What might it mean to queer ecology, to imagine and create queer ecologies?

We invite you to reflect on, to play with, to put these terms to use and submit your creative experiments to you are here: the journal of creative geography. In particular, we invite creative submissions that:

Imagine and enact transformational visions for human and interspecies relations with our environments (broadly defined)
Recognize and disrupt racialized, gendered, sexualized, colonial, and capitalist imaginaries of nature
Explore themes of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, dis/ability, nationality, and other forms of social difference in relation to land, place, and environment
Connect ecological and relational thinking to bodies, infrastructures, cities, and other social and spatial formations
Challenge dualistic and taxonomic thinking about nature and bodies, the ecological and the social
Consider non-human, post-human, and more-than-human ecologies
We invite creative engagements with these themes for the upcoming issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography, which will appear online and in print. Though we provide these conceptual avenues as fodder for thought and inspiration, we also welcome submissions that engage ‘queer ecologies’ in other directions. We are particularly excited to engage critical perspectives on these themes, including but not limited to those drawing from Indigenous, Black, feminist, decolonial, Latinx, anti-racist, queer, trans, and disability scholarship, identities, and cultures.

you are here encourages submissions from geographers, historians, anthropologists, architects, scientists, writers, poets, artists, activists, and anyone else interested in exploring creative geographies. We will review and accept submissions in the form of poetry, creative writing, photography, visual art, film, creative cartography, audio/sonic art, interactive digital works, animation, and other imaginable genres.

Submissions are due January 15, 2022, by the end of the day (wherever you are). For details of the submission guidelines and process, please visit our website (youareheregeography.com). Submissions will be peer-reviewed by graduate students in geography and the arts. Due to limited space, we cannot accept all submissions for publication, nor can we guarantee feedback due to high submission volume and limited editorial capacity.

If you are inspired to respond to this call, please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or ideas to youarehere.arizona@gmail.com. We are happy to discuss possible submissions with you or answer any questions about formats and the submission and production process.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

you are here: the journal of creative geography is published by graduate students in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. The journal, founded in 1998, is an annual publication that seeks to explore geographic themes through articles, fiction, poetry, essays, maps, photographs, and other art forms.

This year, the editor of you are here is Eden Kinkaid.