My name is Sandor Ellix Katz, and I am a fermentation revivalist. My interest in fermentation grew out of my overlapping interests in cooking, nutrition and gardening. It started with sauerkraut. I found an old crock buried in our barn, harvested cabbage from our garden, chopped it up, salted it, and waited. That first kraut tasted so alive and powerfully nutritious! Its sharp flavor sent my salivary glands into a frenzy and got me hooked on fermentation. I have made sauerkraut ever since, earning the nickname Sandorkraut, even as my repertoire has expanded. I have explored and experimented widely in the realm of fermentation, and my mission with this website is to share information and resources, in order to encourage home fermentation experimentalists and propel more live-culture foods out into our culture.

Abraham Weil:

Abraham Weil is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Kansas and the general editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly published by Duke University Press. His training is situated in transgender studies, art and aesthetics, critical animal studies, psychoanalysis, Marxist geography, and black studies. He serves as the inaugural booklist editor in “Transgender Theory” at Bloomsbury Press and is currently co-editing two textbooks: Transgender Theory (Bloomsbury) and Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, Applications (Routledge), and co-authoring the second edition of A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (NYU Press). His current manuscript projects include: Transmolecular Revolution: Trans*versality and the Mattering of Political Life which focuses on revolutionary political formations, anti-black racism, trans theorizing, and continental philosophy in the US and France from the 1960s to the present and On Jargon which focuses on the language of contemporary black intellectual production.

Juno Salazar Parreñas:

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke UP, 2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, the 2019 Society for Medical Anthropology’s New Millennium Book Award and the Anthropology of Work and Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing’s 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize. Her articles appear in such journals as American Ethnologist, Anthropology and History, Cahiers d’Anthropologie Sociale, Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, Environmental Humanities, History and Theory, positions: asia critique, and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society. Her article, “Producing Affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center,” received the 2013 General Anthropology Division’s Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship Prize. She is a former columnist for the Los Angeles based monthly magazine The Lesbian News. Her collaborations and conversations with artists such as Daniel Lie, Ines Lechleitner and Islands Songs (Nicolas Perret and Sylvia Ploner) have been hosted by MoMA, Ö1 Kunstradio, and Dokumenta 14. At Cornell, she teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses that include environmental ethics, introduction to feminist, gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses that speak to Southeast Asian studies. 

Eli Clare:

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (also known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of essays, the award-winning Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion. Additionally he has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies. Eli works as a traveling poet, storyteller, and social justice educator. Since 2008, he has spoken, taught, and consulted (both in-person and remotely) at well over 150 conferences, community events, and colleges across the United States and Canada. He currently serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Disability Project at the Transgender Law Center and is also a Disability Futures Fellow (funded by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference. When he’s not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, camping, riding his recumbent trike, and otherwise having fun adventures.

Macarena Gomez-Barris:

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media, environments, cultural theory and artistic practice. She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarity in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021-2022) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021-2022). She is the author of dozens of essays and curatorial events. She was founder and director of Global South Center, NYC.

Queer Ecology Hanky Project:

Queer Ecology Hanky Project is a traveling exhibition and project with over 100 artist bandanas from across North America–from Vancouver to Mexico City–organized by Vanessa Adams and Mary Tremonte. Queer Ecology Hanky Project has given us windows into divergent possibilities for gender and sexuality, models of resilience and resistance in a world that feels increasingly bleak. In recent years, queers of all genders and proclivities have expanded the definitions of the original gay hanky code—which emerged in the United States in the early 1970s, as a means for gay men to subtly communicate sexual desires—to include different bodies, identities, and activities. This show originates from a love of designing, printing, and distributing bandanas as wearable artwork, and a means to continue a queer communication of flagging, of finding affinity with plants, animals, mycelia, and each other. Queer Ecology Hanky Project is full of artwork intended for activation – artist bandanas that will hopefully accompany walks in the woods, accessorize outfits at queer dance parties, bundle up foraged mushrooms, and start conversations. In that spirit, our past exhibitions have been accompanied by a hanky code dance party, Sappho: Hanky Situation, an artist market, a talk exploring the deeper points of Queer Ecology and a series of workshops exploring printmaking and hanky adornment techniques utilized by artists in the project. 

Carly Thomsen:

Carly Thomsen is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of Visibility Interrupted: Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming and the producer of a related documentary film, In Plain Sight. Her next book, Queering Reproductive Justice, is forthcoming with University of California press. She is a co-editor of Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, Applications, the first feminist studies textbook edited by scholars with PhDs in the field and that features the scholarship of fellow Feminist Studies PhD holders. Her work on LGBTQ activism, queer rurality, reproductive justice, intersectionality, and feminist pedagogy is published in various journals including Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Political Geography, Feminist Studies, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Human Geography, Feminist Formations, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She has also written for various media outlets including The New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and Women’s Media Center. She is currently building a reproductive justice mini golf course and curating feminist and queer art exhibitions in collaboration with the Center for Public Feminism.

Anahi Russo-Garrido:

Anahi Russo Garrido is an Associate Professor in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality studies, and currently serves as Department Chair and Director of the Gender Institute for Teaching and Advocacy (GITA), at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She completed her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at Rutgers University, and postdoctoral fellowships at Carleton College and Brandeis University. Her research and teaching has focused on transnational sexualities, gender and sexuality in Latin America, queer and feminist theory and social justice organizing. More particularly, her current work investigates the transformation of intimacy in Mexico City in the lives of three generations of women participating in queer spaces. She is the co-editor of “Building Feminist Movements and Organizations” and has published articles on queer Mexico City in Women Studies Quarterly, NWSA Journal and the Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies. She is the author of the monograph”Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship and Sex in Queer Mexico City” (Rutgers University Press, 2020).

M Murphy:

Great Lake pollution, refineries, environmental data, manual suction abortion kits, protocols, pap smears, drosophila in bottles, vibrio cholerae, GDP,  girls as human capital, queer fish, PCBs, sick buildings, pollution as colonialism, endocrine disrupting chemicals, phantasmagrams, data justice… These are some of the technologies and phenomena I grapple with as a science and technology studies scholar and historian. My work focuses on technoscience as it relates to environmental and reproductive justice, data politics, chemical exposures, infrastructures, Indigenous science and technology studies, race, and colonialism. I am a Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. I hold a tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice. I direct the Technoscience Research Unit, where I lead the Environmental Data Justice Lab, and co-organize the Technoscience Salon.

Patricia Kaishian:

Dr. Patricia Kaishian is a mycologist and Visiting Professor of Biology at Bard College in NY. Her research focuses on fungal taxonomy, diversity, evolution, symbiosis, and ecology, particularly of the less studied fungal groups, such as the insect-associated Laboulbeniales. She is a co-founder of the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists, which seeks to jointly protect Armenian sovereignty and biodiversity. Patricia also studies philosophy of science, feminist bioscience, and queer theory, exploring how mycology and other scientific disciplines are situated in and informed by our sociopolitical landscape. Her work The science underground: mycology as a queer discipline appears in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Her forthcoming book, Forest Euphoria, will be published by Spiegel & Grau.

Heather Davis:

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020).

Eva Hayward:

Eva Hayward is an anti-disciplinary scholar coming out of the History of Consciousness tradition of the University of California at Santa Cruz (Ph.D. 2008). Her training is in the history of science, film and art history, and psychoanalytic semiotics, attentive to the persistence of sexuality and aesthetics in the structuring of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on aesthetics, ecology, and trans/sexuality studies. Having written field-defining essays in both transgender and science studies – of note: “FingeryEyes: Impressions of Cup Corals” appeared in Cultural Anthropology (2010) and “More Lessons from a Starfish” appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2008)—she has published over 100 essays and delivered nearly 200 talks around the world. Her recent publications include a co-edited (with Dr. Che Gossett) special issue, “Trans in the Time of HIV/AIDS,” of Transgender Studies Quarterly (2021), which has been described as a “monumental achievement” in the “radical reorienting of transgender studies through the ongoing AIDS pandemic.” Her essay, “Painted Camera, Her,” in the art journal e-flux (2021) studies the artist Erica Rutherford to question the “photo ontic” of transgender studies and the unthought position of transsexual women.

Dylan McCarthy Blackston:

Dylan McCarthy Blackston is an assistant professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. He received a Ph.D. in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Arizona, an MA in Women’s Studies from Georgia State University, and a BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia. His training, research, and teaching are in the areas of trans theory, visual culture studies, trans ecologies, feminist studies, and critical life and animal studies. He is co-editor of the recently published book, The Transgender Studies Reader Remix, and is currently working on his first monograph, Trans*plantations of Life: How Capital Makes and Changes Kinds, which examines connections between the transnational political economies of LGBTQ philanthropy, regenerative medicine, and trans-species life.

Erin L. Durban:

Erin L. Durban is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, affiliated with Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies and American Studies. Their scholarship works at the intersections of interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies, transnational American studies, critical disability studies, and critical ecologies. Durban is currently the Lead Co-Chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology and Co-Chair of Critical Disability Studies at UMN. Durban is the former managing editor of Feminist Formations (the NWSA Journal) and has published articles and reviews in American Anthropologist, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Feminist Formations, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Haitian Studies, American Ethnologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, and Anthropology News.

Jennifer Row:

Jennifer Row’s research and teaching interests include queer theory, disability studies, early modern theater (French and English), dance and performance studies, the history of sexuality, and affect theory. Her book Queer Velocities: Time, Sex and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, (Northwestern University Press, 2022) examines new affects and queer desires wrought by the staging of temporal intensities (slownesses and speeds) and the impact of such queer affects on an emerging biopolitics. She is active in building and advocating for disability scholarship on campus. She serves currently as the Arts, Design and Humanities Imagine Co-Chair with Tammy Berberi and Jigna Desai for the project “Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes” and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” She was named a 2021-2023 McKnight Land-Grant Professor. 

Martin Manalansan:

Martin F. Manalansan IV is the Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He has taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of the Philippines, New York University, New School University, Wesleyan University, and the City University of New York. As a cultural anthropologist, he is interested in the ethnographic study of the small, the fleeting, the contingent, and the “infra-ordinary.” He conducts interdisciplinary research on queer theory, sexuality and gender, Asian Americans, Filipino global diaspora, affect and embodiment, food and culture, decolonial politics of social science theory, popular culture, urban modernity, and vernacular globalization. His work focuses on marginalized lives mired not only in the necropolitical but are simultaneously animated by the messy energies of desire and pleasure. Before going back to academia, Manalansan worked for 10 years in AIDS/HIV research, program evaluation and prevention education at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS both in New York City. This experience has shaped his goal in combining academic pursuits with social justice activism.

Kale Fajardo:

Kale B. Fajardo is an associate professor of Asian American studies and American studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities and Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; and reprinted by the University of the Philippines Press, 2013). He is a Co-Editor (with Martin F. Manalansan IV and Alice Y. Hom) of Q + A: Queer Voices in North America (forthcoming from Temple University Press.) Fajardo has been published in journals and anthologies such as “GLQ,” “Mains’l Haul,” Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity; and The Transgender Reader 2, among others. His essay “Aquapelagic Malolos: Island-Water Imaginaries in Coastal Bulacan (Philippines)” will be published in Hydrohumanities: Transforming Currents for Uncertain Futures, edited by Kim De Wolff, Rina C. Faletti, and Ignacio Calvo-López (forthcoming from the University of California Press), while his essay, “In an Archipelago and Sea of Complexities: Contemporary Intersectional/TransPacific/Decolonial Queer and/or Trans Filipinx American Studies” will be published in The Critical Filipinx Studies Reader, edited by Rick Bonus and Antonio Tiongson, (also forthcoming from Temple).

Corinne Teed:

Corinne Teed is a research-based artist working in printmaking, book arts, time-based media, and social practice. Their work lives at the intersections of queer theory, ecology, and critical animal studies in the context of settler colonialism. Much of their creative practice centers on relationships, whether through collaboration, participation, interviews, or encounters with the more-than-human. Teed currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Art Department of University of Minnesota and come Fall 2023, will be faculty at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

Lorena Munoz:

My research is focused on (im)migrants communities in the global south, particularly in the areas the informal economy, food, gender, sexuality, race and health. Growing up in Mexico, street vending was simply a tapestry of everyday life. On Sundays after church I bought my food, and every day my breakfast or my lunch was bought outside of school from street vendors. When I moved to Los Angeles for graduate work, I found that the community and public landscape incredibly similar to the one where I grew up in Mexico. Street vendors would set up outside my apartment like clockwork, offering the predominantly Latino community traditional food and goods. This has influenced my interests in street vending, urban community food production and food justice activisms.

Mel Y. Chen

Mel Y. Chen (they/them+) is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Director for the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Science, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Research Clusters. Previously, they served as Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College, and the Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Their training spans the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, with a doctorate degree in linguistics that they transitioned to from computer engineering. Their 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, which won the MLA GL/Q Caucus Alan Bray Award), explores questions of racialization, gender, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of animacy. Chen’s second book project, which they are now completing, concerns the conceptual territories of toxicity and intoxication and their involvement in 19th century archival histories of the interanimation of race and disability.

Cleo Wölfle Hazard

Dr. Wölfle Hazard’s research informs two areas of thought: (1) ecological and social dimensions of human relations to rivers and their multi-species inhabitants, and (2) how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management. An activist and artist with formal training in ecology, geomorphology, critical social science, and feminist science and technology studies, he conducts collaborative research in partnership with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists, and local community members. Wölfle Hazard and his students are currently working on the Duwamish River in Washington and the Klamath River in California, as well as in the freshwater-saltwater interface around Puget Sound.

Jenne Schmidt

Dr. Jenne Schmidt focuses on critical disability theory, queer politics, and environmental studies. Their current research is centered on interrogating the ways that environmental futures are positioned as incommensurable with crip and queer existence/futurity. They refuse the notion that in order to secure a sustainable ecological future for humans, we must eradicate (via a logic of environmental management that draws on eugenics-adjacent frameworks) corporeal differences including disability and queerness. Dr. Schmidt’s research engages this tension to trouble the foundations of environmentalism and disability, in hopes of locating the moments and places of coalitional possibility where both eco-futures and “desiring disability” (Kafer, 2013) are present.

Facilitators:

Aren Aizura, Associate Professor of Gender Women’s and Sexuality Studies, UMN

Stuart McLean, Professor of Anthropology, UMN

Jean Langford, Professor Emerita Anthropology, UMN

Tracey Deutsch, Associate Professor of History, UMN