IAS Spotlights: Witchcraft and Queer Ecology Research Crossover Day

Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows from across two overlapping IAS Research Spotlights, Queer Ecology and The Supernatural (Callum Angus & Professor Catriona Sandilands) and Witchcraft as more-than-human Ontology and Decolonial Practice (Dr Marcelitte Failla & Associate Professor Margaretha Haughwout).

Fellows from both Queer Ecology and Witchcraft will meet in International house and be joined by organisers and invited academics working in the connected fields and identified above for a longer discussion and debate of how the two spheres interconnect to produce creative dialogue into the ongoing importance of ecology and the more than human, and the points at which ongoing engagements with the supernatural and folkloric and contemporary witch and shamanic practices can continue making these ideas pertinent in our climate crisis and ecological fall out.

A key question pertinent to all fellows is the ongoing role of creativity, arts and humanities in times of crisis?

The event will be primarily aimed at a specific group of academics but the workshop will be open for anyone to attend online, and there will be a limited number of in-person spaces. The focus of the event will be to workshop and map ideas around the two showcases and discover how they might feed into each other. We will have visual documents, photographs and drawing and mapping, utilising spell making as method, that will be compiled into a map of the day which will be available to be published in the IAS website. The event will set the foundation for legacy building into these themes and will establish Loughborough and the IAS as a key home for these debates.

Arrivals from 9.45am for a 10am start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the workshop from 1pm.