Queer Ecopedagogies

This volume builds on the momentum surrounding queer work within environmental education, while also encouraging new connections between environmental education research and the growing bodies of literature dedicated to queer deconstructions of categories such as “nature,” “environment,” and “animal.” The book is composed of submissions that engage with existing literature from queer ecology, queer theory, and various explorations of sexuality and gender within the context of human-animal-nature relationships. The book deepens and diversifies environmental education by providing new theoretical and methodological insights for scholarship and practice across a variety of educational contexts. Queer ecopedagogies provide important critical points of view for educators who seek broader goals centred around social and ecological justice by encouraging counter-hegemonic views of bodies, nature, and community. The scope of this book is multi-or interdisciplinary in order to cast a wide net around what kinds of spaces, relationships, and practices are considered educational, pedagogical, or curricular. The volume includes chapters that are conceptual, theoretical, and empirical.

Better late than never, an old aphorism appropriately applied to this new, exhilarating, quite queer collection. Neither environmental education nor queer theory will be, I suspect, the same. My congratulations – and gratitude - to the editor and contributors.


– Professor William Pinar, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada



Given that environmental education has generally been on the margins of more conventional subjects, one might have expected it to have a long history of engaging with creative, disruptive ways of thinking about place and pedagogy. And yet, with a small number of exceptions, it has not. This wonderful collection of essays shouldhelp change this. It provides a Mystery Tour of the field, showing how a failure to think queerly distorts nature and constricts educational opportunities.

– Professor Michael J. Reiss, UCL Institute of Education, London