Univ. of Regensburg; Martyna Miernecka (Web) and Paweł Matusz (Web)
Time: 15.-16.10.2026
Venue: Univ. of Regensburg
Proposals by: 15.02.2026
In literary and arts research on socialist worlds, both queer studies and environmental histories have been expanding – yet we still lack approaches that would systematically integrate these strands across global state socialisms. This conference responds to that gap by inviting work that reads queer practices alongside institutional and environmental policies and traces the queer ecological impulses emerging from socialist contexts across the globe.
As a conceptual starting point, we draw on queer ecology as an interdisciplinary field that explores how environmental thinking and queer critique inform each other, and how ideas of “nature” and sexuality are co-produced in culture, politics, and everyday life. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson describe its central task as to “probe the intersections of sex and nature,” in ways that reshape both sexual politics and environmental politics (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010). Following Nicole Seymour, we ask: “What counts as ‘natural’ – and why?” – not only in relation to gender and sexuality, but also to environment, race, immigration status, health status, ability, and class (Seymour 2013). In this view, environments can both naturalize norms and become sites for challenging them, opening space to read LGBTQIA2S+ histories and cultures as entangled with more-than-human worlds.
Why focus on global state socialisms? First, we want to move beyond the moralizing narrative that treats socialism as a single story of ecological catastrophe, and instead compare how environmental damage and ecological governance were produced within broader twentieth-century modernizations. (Engel-Di Mauro 2021) Second, socialist worlds also generated early debates about the environmental and social costs of economic growth – debates that resonated across both capitalist and socialist states, complicating the image of a monolithic socialist public sphere. (Parfianowicz 2022) Third, these contexts invite new questions about the entanglements of human and non-human in socialist states – opening space for eco-socialist and proto-degrowth genealogies, as well as for environmental-justice perspectives attuned to inequality.
Placing queer scholarship on state socialist worlds in dialogue with Continue reading

Dialog Büro. Dialogue Office for Civil Society Cooperation
Auftaktveranstaltung L*Ost 2026; Sonntags-Club Berlin e.V.
Haus der Geschichte Österreichs (hdgö)
24. „Tea Hour“ der Sammlung Frauennachlässe am Institut für Geschichte der Univ. Wien