Transecologies: nature, animals and more-than-animal perspectives on the environment (Open group)

9th Nordic Trans Studies Conference, December 8-9, 2025, Örebro University

With this workshop, we wish to create a space for discussion of transecologies and trananimalities in the Nordic context. Transecology and trananimalities draw from trans and non-binary experiences to challenge, transform, create subversive ways of envisioning ecological worlds, our relationships to and our interdependencies with the more-than-human, more-than-animal and the non-human.

For this workshop we would like to focus on how trans and non-binary perspectives can challenge colonialist, ableist, anthropocentrist and cissexist views of nature. Which vulnerabilities, alliances, intimacies, might they suggest? Which political, ethical, imaginary alternatives might they create? Through which concepts, from which knowledges, for which actions? Are our concepts still anthropocentric and colonialist, for instance, even if intended to deconstruct these paradigms (e.g.“non-human animals” / “more-than-human world”)? What alternatives to these terminologies can we create? Contributions from all disciplines, beyond and across them, on these topics and aside from those, are warmly welcome.

Presenters

●     Wibke Straube & Ely/iott Mermans: Transecological Relations: The Animal-Animal, More-Than-Animal, Human Animal, More-Than-Human and the Even-More-Than-That

●      Jasper J. Verlinden: Carried in the beaks of birds, dropped elsewhere, far from our roots, we grow’: The Non-Human in Contemporary Trans and Crip of Color Poetry

●      Valerie Sofie Tollhopf: Historical Materialist Contributions to Trans Ecologies: Trans* New Materialism, Capitalism, and the State

●      Anthony Clair Wagner-Vepsä: Root babies – growing transecological rootings

Facilitators

Wibke Straube, they/them (Karlstad University, Sweden): Wibke works with a focus on of trans and queer embodiment, affective methodologies and possibilities to create zones of liveability. They were part of the Kone-funded project “Trans*Creative: Health, Violence, and Environment in Transgender Cultural Production” and are a founding member of the Nordic Network for Trans Studies. Wibke regularly hosts the Trans Research Residencies at the Centre for Gender Studies in Karlstad.

Ely/iott Mermans, he*/they (Helsinki University, Finland): Ely/iott has a background in philosophy, with his research interests lying somewhere at the intersection of environmental ethics, philosophy of science, anticolonial research and trans* ecologies. Ely/iott is currently part of the research project WEIRD – Who’s sustainability? Disability and queer perspectives for sustainability transformations –, where he is working on the contribution of trans* and queer research and activism to environmental justice, as well as to conservation issues in relation to non-human animal predation.

The working group is open to non-participating audiences.