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dp patrick

Berea College, Women's & Gender Studies, Faculty Member

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I am a scholar-writer-poet, educator-teacher-facilitator, activist, and art-maker with more than fifteen years of experience working with/in social movements, political collectives, and organizations committed to liberation.

I am also an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the bell hooks center at Berea College.

My academic research is focused on transfeminist and queer autonomous politics, queer ecologies, urban spaces and place-making, faggotry, non-conformist life/living, and anti-/counter-institutional/grassroots knowledge production. I am a member of the Bologna, Italy, based transfeministqueer/frocia collective Laboratorio Smaschieramenti; I am also a founding member of the Antipod Sound Collective and a co-keeper of the no big deal sit, which is a meditation-mindfulness collective created and curated by Rev angel Kyodo williams.

anti-racist | anti-fascist | anti-sexist

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Books by dp patrick

A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban

by dp patrick and Rajyashree Reddy

What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledg... more What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies.

Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference
Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production
Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban
Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology

Papers by dp patrick

A Big Gay Garden: Cultivating Collective in Str*ke Time

Ecozon@, 2023

The Politics of Urban Sustainability

Conversations in Queer Ecologies: An Editorial

This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: &quot;From Queer/Na... more This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: &quot;From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating 20 Years of Scholarship and Creativity.&quot; This special issue includes contributions from: Bambitchell, Naomi Booth, Goedele De Calluwé &amp; Marion Wasserbauer, David Griffiths, Anabel Khoo, Elana Santana, and Marianna Szczygielska. Book reviews by Sarah May Lindsay and Cameron Mitchell. The issue also contains transcripts of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies with Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, Peter Hobbs, and Cate Sandilands. An audio podcast of the roundtable will soon be available through the UnderCurrents website (www.yorku.ca/currents) and through the co-producing series CoHearence (http://niche-canada.org/research/cohearence-podcast/).

TransFeminist Scholars on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Revista Feminismos, 2015

Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implicat... more Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implications of their work on social transformation, they focus on how their research affects the social reality and the lives of the the people they work &quot; on &quot; , &quot; with &quot; , or &quot; for. &quot; These are quite often marginalized groups. In this paper, we would like to critically address the issue from the point of view of how the material and cultural conditions of academic work affect us-the researchers. We will highlight that the discipline required by the academic labor market produces a kind of subjectivity that actually hinders the social transformation we are seeking as queer activists, although the content of our research may be consistent with it and may even seem to foster it. It is not by accident that the urge to address the issue in this terms comes from the Italian context, where the conditions of work in general and academic work in particular have been degenerating rapidly over the past ten years. At the same time, the privatization of university seems to be a global trend, such that our analysis may be of interest also for Brazilian feminist and queer researchers. We are writing as members of SomMovimento NazioAnale, a network of transfeminist queer collectives and single activists based in various parts of Italy, also including some activists that used to be based in Italy and emigrated in other European countries for economic reasons. Some people within this network work in the academy; almost all are in very precarious conditions. Recently, the network started a discussion about the relationship between academic work and activism.

2017. Ruddick, S., Peake, L., Patrick, D. and Tanyildiz, G. S. "Planetary Urbanization: An Urban Theory for our Time?". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

by Linda J Peake and dp patrick

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we ar... more In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre's ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban. The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance. 1 Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization.

Placing Planetary Urbanization in Other Fields of Vision

by dp patrick, Rajyashree Reddy, and Susan Ruddick

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018

This is the introduction to a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space that... more This is the introduction to a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space that stages feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial engagements with the research framework known as "planetary urbanization." In the paper, the author's lay out the stakes of contemporary urban knowledge production and discuss the range of interventions collected as part of the special issue.

TransFeminist Scholars on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Revista Feminismos, Vol.3, n.1, 2015

by caterina peroni, alessia acquistapace, dp patrick, and Beatrice Busi

Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implicat... more Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implications of their work on social transformation, they focus on how their research affects the social reality and the lives of the the people they work " on " , " with " , or " for. " These are quite often marginalized groups. In this paper, we would like to critically address the issue from the point of view of how the material and cultural conditions of academic work affect us-the researchers. We will highlight that the discipline required by the academic labor market produces a kind of subjectivity that actually hinders the social transformation we are seeking as queer activists, although the content of our research may be consistent with it and may even seem to foster it. It is not by accident that the urge to address the issue in this terms comes from the Italian context, where the conditions of work in general and academic work in particular have been degenerating rapidly over the past ten years. At the same time, the privatization of university seems to be a global trend, such that our analysis may be of interest also for Brazilian feminist and queer researchers. We are writing as members of SomMovimento NazioAnale, a network of transfeminist queer collectives and single activists based in various parts of Italy, also including some activists that used to be based in Italy and emigrated in other European countries for economic reasons. Some people within this network work in the academy; almost all are in very precarious conditions. Recently, the network started a discussion about the relationship between academic work and activism.

Conversations in Queer Ecologies: An Editorial

by Amanda Di Battista and dp patrick

This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: "From Queer/Nature to Q... more This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: "From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating 20 Years of Scholarship and Creativity." This special issue includes contributions from: Bambitchell, Naomi Booth, Goedele De Calluwé & Marion Wasserbauer, David Griffiths, Anabel Khoo, Elana Santana, and Marianna Szczygielska. Book reviews by Sarah May Lindsay and Cameron Mitchell. The issue also contains transcripts of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies with Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, Peter Hobbs, and Cate Sandilands. An audio podcast of the roundtable will soon be available through the UnderCurrents website (www.yorku.ca/currents) and through the co-producing series CoHearence (http://niche-canada.org/research/cohearence-podcast/).

The Matter of Displacement: A Queer Urban Ecology of New York City's High Line

Social and Cultural Geography, 2014

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment o... more This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City’s High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative-park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession,’ focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing in the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights into the redevelopment strategy, this interpretive account of the High Line’s redevelopment thinks plants and queers together. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.

Book Chapters by dp patrick

Between the Fool and the World

Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics, 2016

A critical meditation on the genealogy of the term assemblage (agencement) and its ascendance in ... more

Reading Three Ways: Ask Me How!

Spaces of Spirituality, 2018

Professor dusky purples introduces her signature three-way reading methodology.

Queering the Urban Forest: Invasions, Mutualisms, and Eco-Political Creativity with the Tree of Heaven

How would a tree build the city? Such a question requires us to think in a rather unconventional ... more How would a tree build the city? Such a question requires us to think in a rather unconventional way about urban planning and urban ecologies, not to mention the actual or potential agency of non-human actors and forces in both of those areas. Trees do not apparently urbanize, at least not in any immediately recognizable way, unless you analogize climax forests to the dense aggregations of skyward buildings found in the downtown cores of today’s global cities. And so my question is more provocative than literal, especially because I ask it with a particular tree in mind: Ailanthus altissima.

In this chapter, I take it as both an object of analysis and an opportunity for targeted intervention into some concepts and practices that circulate in urban political ecology and urban forestry. Through three empirical cases, I open some grounded conceptual questions regarding the ethics and politics of our entanglement with trees both in actual cities and in a broader context of global urbanization. Each case serves to open possibilities for critically queering practices and discourses of both academic scholarship in urban political ecology and in our everyday engagements with the urban forest, in a broad sense.

Podcasts by dp patrick

Antipod Episode 1: Clyde Woods, Dispossession, and Resistance in New Orleans

by Brian Williams, Allison Guess, Alex A Moulton, and dp patrick

Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019

In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of ou... more In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.

Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.

The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.

This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.

Antipod Episode 0: Introduction

by dp patrick, Allison Guess, Alex A Moulton, and Brian Williams

Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019

In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the... more

CoHearence 07 – Queer Ecologies

by Andrew Mark, Amanda Di Battista, and dp patrick

Produced in collaboration with the editorial collective of the student-run journal UnderCurrents ... more Produced in collaboration with the editorial collective of the student-run journal UnderCurrents (www.yorku.ca/currents), this episode features a roundtable discussion with Peter Hobbs, Brent Ingram, and Cate Sandilands. The discussion coincides with the release of UnderCurrents Vol. 19, "From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies," which celebrates 20 years since the publication of UnderCurrents Vol. 6 "Queer/Nature." The participants discuss the pasts, presents, and futures of queer ecological scholarship in conversation with this episode's co-producer, Darren Patrick.

Book Reviews by dp patrick

"'H,i,g,h, L,i,n,e'" Architectonics

The Avery Review, 2019

A review of two books by Lucas Crawford: Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Moder... more

Other Publications by dp patrick

Lancione, M., ed. 2016. Rethinking Life at the Margins. The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics. London: Routledge. (Cover+Introduction)

by Michele Lancione, Elisabetta Rosa, Matteo Puttilli, AbdouMaliq Simone, Gaja Maestri, Kavita Ramakrishnan, dp patrick, Francisco Calafate-Faria, and Cheryl Gilge

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple politica... more Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.

https://www.routledge.com/products/isbn/9781472465757 -- 50% off with code 'ASHGATE230'

Querying Eco-logics: A collective experiment in affective ecologies and the politics of form and function

by Jessica Caporusso, Roberta Buiani, and dp patrick

The term ‘ecology’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as an ‘economy of nature’ in compariso... more The term ‘ecology’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as an ‘economy of nature’ in comparison with and contradistinction to human economies; ecology implies a science of counting and accounting. The scientific discourse is about countable nature, that is, an entity composed of measurable bits that naturally strive toward a specific direction in order to maintain a balance. Historically, the ‘economy of nature’ has been used interchangeably with the notion of ‘balance of nature’, suggesting that without human interference nature is self-regulating and teleological, striving to maintain itself.[1] Without such a goal, the science of ecology seems to be unable to ‘function’ — no models, no predictions, or even statements about how species might relate seem possible. This collectively authored essay queries ‘ecology’ alongside a yearlong project undertaken at the Toronto Technoscience Salon.

https://technoscienceunit.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/querying-eco-logics

A Feminist Urban Theory for Our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban

by dp patrick and Rajyashree Reddy

What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledg... more What does a feminist urban theory look like for the twenty first century? This book puts knowledges of feminist urban scholars, feminist scholars of social reproduction, and other urban theorists into conversation to propose an approach to the urban that recognises social reproduction both as foundational to urban transformations and as a methodological entry-point for urban studies.

Offers an approach feminist urban theory that remains intentionally cautious of universal uses of social reproduction theory, instead focusing analytical attention on historical contingency and social difference
Eleven chapters that collectively address distinct elements of the contemporary crisis in social reproduction and the urban through the lenses of infrastructure and subjectivity formation as well as through feminist efforts to decolonize urban knowledge production
Deepens understandings of how people shape and reshape the spatial forms of their everyday lives, furthering understandings of the 'infinite variety' of the urban
Essential reading for academics, researchers and scholars within urban studies, human geography, gender and sexuality studies, and sociology

A Big Gay Garden: Cultivating Collective in Str*ke Time

Ecozon@, 2023

The Politics of Urban Sustainability

Conversations in Queer Ecologies: An Editorial

This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: &quot;From Queer/Na... more This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: &quot;From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating 20 Years of Scholarship and Creativity.&quot; This special issue includes contributions from: Bambitchell, Naomi Booth, Goedele De Calluwé &amp; Marion Wasserbauer, David Griffiths, Anabel Khoo, Elana Santana, and Marianna Szczygielska. Book reviews by Sarah May Lindsay and Cameron Mitchell. The issue also contains transcripts of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies with Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, Peter Hobbs, and Cate Sandilands. An audio podcast of the roundtable will soon be available through the UnderCurrents website (www.yorku.ca/currents) and through the co-producing series CoHearence (http://niche-canada.org/research/cohearence-podcast/).

TransFeminist Scholars on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Revista Feminismos, 2015

Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implicat... more Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implications of their work on social transformation, they focus on how their research affects the social reality and the lives of the the people they work &quot; on &quot; , &quot; with &quot; , or &quot; for. &quot; These are quite often marginalized groups. In this paper, we would like to critically address the issue from the point of view of how the material and cultural conditions of academic work affect us-the researchers. We will highlight that the discipline required by the academic labor market produces a kind of subjectivity that actually hinders the social transformation we are seeking as queer activists, although the content of our research may be consistent with it and may even seem to foster it. It is not by accident that the urge to address the issue in this terms comes from the Italian context, where the conditions of work in general and academic work in particular have been degenerating rapidly over the past ten years. At the same time, the privatization of university seems to be a global trend, such that our analysis may be of interest also for Brazilian feminist and queer researchers. We are writing as members of SomMovimento NazioAnale, a network of transfeminist queer collectives and single activists based in various parts of Italy, also including some activists that used to be based in Italy and emigrated in other European countries for economic reasons. Some people within this network work in the academy; almost all are in very precarious conditions. Recently, the network started a discussion about the relationship between academic work and activism.

2017. Ruddick, S., Peake, L., Patrick, D. and Tanyildiz, G. S. "Planetary Urbanization: An Urban Theory for our Time?". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

by Linda J Peake and dp patrick

In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we ar... more In our engagement with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid's thesis on planetary urbanization we argue that, while they have successfully marked some important limits of mainstream thinking on the urban, their privileging of epistemology cannot produce an urban theory for our time. Engaging in a symptomatic reading of their work, and with a focus on the implications of their limited mobilization of social ontology—or Lefebvre's ontology of the everyday—we ask what is occluded in planetary urbanization. In particular, we explore three areas of concern: the urban as the grounds for difference, centrality and the everyday; the omission of subjects of and occlusion of subjectivity; and the occlusion of a constitutive outside and its political capacities to remake the urban. The changing geographies and pace of urbanization over the past half century have been recasting urban theory, governance, and policy on a global stage. The second decade of the 21st-century is proving to be an especially momentous time for urban knowledge production in which the political stakes are enormously high, with the urban figuring as both cause and consequence of many contemporary planetary issues: the urban is both the instigator of and the solution to global climate change; it is the site of increasing inequality and the urbanization of poverty even as it is also a crucible for innovation and creativity; and it is ground zero for a new era of global governance. 1 Within this climate of different political possibilities for the urban, a number of competing, conflicting, and complementary geographical imaginaries have emerged to make sense of contemporary urbanization.

Placing Planetary Urbanization in Other Fields of Vision

by dp patrick, Rajyashree Reddy, and Susan Ruddick

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018

This is the introduction to a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space that... more This is the introduction to a special issue of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space that stages feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial engagements with the research framework known as "planetary urbanization." In the paper, the author's lay out the stakes of contemporary urban knowledge production and discuss the range of interventions collected as part of the special issue.

TransFeminist Scholars on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Revista Feminismos, Vol.3, n.1, 2015

by caterina peroni, alessia acquistapace, dp patrick, and Beatrice Busi

Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implicat... more Typically, when researchers in social sciences reflect upon political engagement and the implications of their work on social transformation, they focus on how their research affects the social reality and the lives of the the people they work " on " , " with " , or " for. " These are quite often marginalized groups. In this paper, we would like to critically address the issue from the point of view of how the material and cultural conditions of academic work affect us-the researchers. We will highlight that the discipline required by the academic labor market produces a kind of subjectivity that actually hinders the social transformation we are seeking as queer activists, although the content of our research may be consistent with it and may even seem to foster it. It is not by accident that the urge to address the issue in this terms comes from the Italian context, where the conditions of work in general and academic work in particular have been degenerating rapidly over the past ten years. At the same time, the privatization of university seems to be a global trend, such that our analysis may be of interest also for Brazilian feminist and queer researchers. We are writing as members of SomMovimento NazioAnale, a network of transfeminist queer collectives and single activists based in various parts of Italy, also including some activists that used to be based in Italy and emigrated in other European countries for economic reasons. Some people within this network work in the academy; almost all are in very precarious conditions. Recently, the network started a discussion about the relationship between academic work and activism.

Conversations in Queer Ecologies: An Editorial

by Amanda Di Battista and dp patrick

This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: "From Queer/Nature to Q... more This is the opening editorial for Volume 19 of the journal UnderCurrents: "From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies: Celebrating 20 Years of Scholarship and Creativity." This special issue includes contributions from: Bambitchell, Naomi Booth, Goedele De Calluwé & Marion Wasserbauer, David Griffiths, Anabel Khoo, Elana Santana, and Marianna Szczygielska. Book reviews by Sarah May Lindsay and Cameron Mitchell. The issue also contains transcripts of a roundtable discussion on queer ecologies with Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram, Peter Hobbs, and Cate Sandilands. An audio podcast of the roundtable will soon be available through the UnderCurrents website (www.yorku.ca/currents) and through the co-producing series CoHearence (http://niche-canada.org/research/cohearence-podcast/).

The Matter of Displacement: A Queer Urban Ecology of New York City's High Line

Social and Cultural Geography, 2014

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment o... more This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City’s High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative-park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession,’ focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing in the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights into the redevelopment strategy, this interpretive account of the High Line’s redevelopment thinks plants and queers together. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.

Between the Fool and the World

Rethinking Life at the Margins: The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics, 2016

A critical meditation on the genealogy of the term assemblage (agencement) and its ascendance in ... more

Reading Three Ways: Ask Me How!

Spaces of Spirituality, 2018

Professor dusky purples introduces her signature three-way reading methodology.

Queering the Urban Forest: Invasions, Mutualisms, and Eco-Political Creativity with the Tree of Heaven

How would a tree build the city? Such a question requires us to think in a rather unconventional ... more How would a tree build the city? Such a question requires us to think in a rather unconventional way about urban planning and urban ecologies, not to mention the actual or potential agency of non-human actors and forces in both of those areas. Trees do not apparently urbanize, at least not in any immediately recognizable way, unless you analogize climax forests to the dense aggregations of skyward buildings found in the downtown cores of today’s global cities. And so my question is more provocative than literal, especially because I ask it with a particular tree in mind: Ailanthus altissima.

In this chapter, I take it as both an object of analysis and an opportunity for targeted intervention into some concepts and practices that circulate in urban political ecology and urban forestry. Through three empirical cases, I open some grounded conceptual questions regarding the ethics and politics of our entanglement with trees both in actual cities and in a broader context of global urbanization. Each case serves to open possibilities for critically queering practices and discourses of both academic scholarship in urban political ecology and in our everyday engagements with the urban forest, in a broad sense.

Antipod Episode 1: Clyde Woods, Dispossession, and Resistance in New Orleans

by Brian Williams, Allison Guess, Alex A Moulton, and dp patrick

Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019

In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of ou... more In this first full episode of Antipod we turn our attention to Black Geographies, the theme of our first season. Hosts Brian Williams and Akira Drake Rodriguez walk listeners through a series of clips from a panel on Clyde Woods’s posthomously published work Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restorations of Post-Katrina New Orleans, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Laura Pulido (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Brian and Akira comment on the use of Woods’s “blues epistemology” framework to contextualize the ongoing making and re-making of Black geographies in New Orleans. Covering themes from dispossession to displacement to the fallacy of “natural” disasters, this episode challenges traditional notions of urban planning and privileges what Woods’s calls “the visions of the dispossessed.” Clips from this episode are from an “Author Meets Critics” panel at the Community Book Center in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, a space of continuity for pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans residents. The participants in the discussion were: former Woods student and activist-poet Sunni Patterson; Khalil Shahid, Senior Policy Advocate at the National Resource Defense Council; Anna Brand, Asst. Prof at the University of California at Berkeley; Shana Griffin from Jane’s Place, New Orleans’ first community land trust; Sue Mobley, who, at the time of the panel, was the Public Programs Manager for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane University; and Jordan T. Camp (editor) who at the time of the panel was at Barnard College, and is now the Director of Research at the People’s Forum in New York.

Episode 1 is hosted by Akira Drake Rodriguez and Brian Williams.

The episode was mixed and edited by KT Bender and Brian Williams.

This episode was produced by all members of the Antipod Sound Collective.

Antipod Episode 0: Introduction

by dp patrick, Allison Guess, Alex A Moulton, and Brian Williams

Antipod: A Radical Geography Podcast and Sound Collective, 2019

In this episode, the members of the Antipod Sound Collective introduce themselves and discuss the... more

CoHearence 07 – Queer Ecologies

by Andrew Mark, Amanda Di Battista, and dp patrick

Produced in collaboration with the editorial collective of the student-run journal UnderCurrents ... more Produced in collaboration with the editorial collective of the student-run journal UnderCurrents (www.yorku.ca/currents), this episode features a roundtable discussion with Peter Hobbs, Brent Ingram, and Cate Sandilands. The discussion coincides with the release of UnderCurrents Vol. 19, "From Queer/Nature to Queer Ecologies," which celebrates 20 years since the publication of UnderCurrents Vol. 6 "Queer/Nature." The participants discuss the pasts, presents, and futures of queer ecological scholarship in conversation with this episode's co-producer, Darren Patrick.

"'H,i,g,h, L,i,n,e'" Architectonics

The Avery Review, 2019

A review of two books by Lucas Crawford: Transgender Architectonics: The Shape of Change in Moder... more

Lancione, M., ed. 2016. Rethinking Life at the Margins. The Assemblage of Contexts, Subjects and Politics. London: Routledge. (Cover+Introduction)

by Michele Lancione, Elisabetta Rosa, Matteo Puttilli, AbdouMaliq Simone, Gaja Maestri, Kavita Ramakrishnan, dp patrick, Francisco Calafate-Faria, and Cheryl Gilge

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple politica... more Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.

https://www.routledge.com/products/isbn/9781472465757 -- 50% off with code 'ASHGATE230'

Querying Eco-logics: A collective experiment in affective ecologies and the politics of form and function

by Jessica Caporusso, Roberta Buiani, and dp patrick

The term ‘ecology’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as an ‘economy of nature’ in compariso... more The term ‘ecology’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as an ‘economy of nature’ in comparison with and contradistinction to human economies; ecology implies a science of counting and accounting. The scientific discourse is about countable nature, that is, an entity composed of measurable bits that naturally strive toward a specific direction in order to maintain a balance. Historically, the ‘economy of nature’ has been used interchangeably with the notion of ‘balance of nature’, suggesting that without human interference nature is self-regulating and teleological, striving to maintain itself.[1] Without such a goal, the science of ecology seems to be unable to ‘function’ — no models, no predictions, or even statements about how species might relate seem possible. This collectively authored essay queries ‘ecology’ alongside a yearlong project undertaken at the Toronto Technoscience Salon.

https://technoscienceunit.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/querying-eco-logics