Queer(ing) ecopedagogy: Our walk with/in the forest

In March 2023, we took 14 individuals enrolled in our module, Environment and Climate Politics, to a forest in the West Midlands. The purpose of the fieldtrip was to shift our learners’ embodied experiences by placing them outside (the classroom) and away from those repeated/stylised interactions with the usual content, objects and spaces associated with Politics and International Relations learning and teaching. Indeed, environment-related teaching in Politics and International Relations tends to focus on institutional responses and multi-level policy-making. By taking the students to the forest, we sought to invite consideration of how we embody our relationship with nature and, simultaneously, trouble the ontological foundations that underpin Politics and International Relations approaches. Inspired by scholarship on queer- and eco-pedagogy, we were keen to challenge norms around how we provide environmental politics education, challenging teaching customs in our discipline and actively troubling the discipline’s very boundaries. This paper reflects on that initial fieldtrip and how the exercise has informed the design of the module and assessments. The paper considers the blurring and permeability of the roles and responsibilities of ‘student’, ‘lecturer’, ‘guide’ and ‘forest’ in this context and the implications that holds for teaching environment-related content as part of a Politics and International Relations curriculum.