Queer space and place
Friday 25th February 2022 11:00-12:30 | Online (zoom)
Declan Wiffen
What is queer space and how do we cruise through it? How can we think queerly about space as creative writers and teachers of creative writing? Kent University lecturer Declan Wiffen presents his own research on writing queer space and place, and leads a short writing workshop that explores the relationship between queer ecologies and creative writing pedagogy.
Declan Wiffen is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Contemporary Literature at Kent University. Declan’s recent research is aligned with the environmental humanities and queer ecologies, with interests in literature related to marshlands, lichens, plants, and the other-than-human. Current projects include: editing the fifth edition of Litmus, a magazine exploring the interaction between poetry and science, on the cultural repre-sentation of lichen; an article provisionally titled ‘Conspiring with Sea Kale: Derek Jarman’s unnatural pedagogy’ which explores critical plant studies, queer ecologies and staying with the trouble of the environmental crisis; a collaborative essay on masculinity, literature and pedagogy for a collection called The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies edited by Hilary Emmet and Christopher Lloyd. Declan recently designed and led a series of creative writing workshops entitled ‘Cruising the Estuary’, as part of the 2021 Estuary Festival. The workshops played on the double meaning of cruising—sailing on water & searching for sexual encounters. Disrupting the idea that queer identities are ‘unnatural’, exploring resonances and entanglements between queerness & estuaries, asking what cruising ‘nature’ could look like?
The recording of this event can be found below: