Space & Sexuality

Let's talk about geography. Not just the maps, mountains and rivers that we might remember from our school textbooks, but the everyday task of being professional geographers in the world. Eden Kinkaid joins the podcast this week to discuss queer and trans phenomenology and how this has a bearing on being queer and trans within the discipline of Geography. Shownotes: The Production of Space (Henri...

We are all familiar with the problematic and limiting dichtomy of the Global North and Global South; how can we then research and practise solidarity that refuses this split geography? In Niharika Banerjea and Kath Browne's project  Liveable Lives: Living and Surviving LGBTQ Equalities in India and the UK attempted exactly this. They join the podcast this week to discuss this work. Shownotes: Sapp...

What are the geographies of film? Helen Leung joins the podcast to discuss how films are integral to place-making in both material and aesthetic senses. Whilst geography can turn to films for visual representations of spaces, experimental techniques that mediate space and politicised narratives that trouble them, Helen emphasises that geography can be deployed to study queer screen cultures too. I...

We get by with a little help from our friends, and for LGBTQ+ people, sometimes our friendships are what sustain us. In this episode I (Joe Jukes) reflect on the chapter "LGBTQ+ friendship and spatial commitments: queer socialities in the making of a new rural" (2025) to explore why a queer friendship is not the same as a "chosen family", as soothing as that phrase may be. I also talk about my hom...

Derek Ruez joins the show to talk about tensions and politics within the rainbow. Whilst Pride is a moment where many communities under the LGBTQ+ come together to make collective demands, it is also a space where multiple tensions emerge and conflicting politics are enacted. Derek shares his research into the multiple Pride-spaces of Copenhagen, in which the politics of migration and racialisatio...

What is LGBTQ+ life like in the suburbs? Some would argue it isn't very vibrant, if it is there at all. Alison Bain and Julie Podmore join the podcast this week to share how that argument doesn't hold for Canadian metropolitan suburbs. Their book "Queerburbia" presents research findings from 10 municipalities across Canada and in this episode they outline some of its key contributions. Speaking ab...

Student housing is a space that many people live 'through', but what structures this living, its gender and sexual possibility? In our discussion, Dr. Chan Arun-Pina problematises how student housing is conceptualised, as it figures a temporary and transitory form of accommodation that constrains experimentation, transformation and senses of permanence. Chan's chapter discusses the cisheteronormat...

How do you notice the world around you? And how reciprocally can you live with it? In this episode, CWH discusses "queer and trans ecologies", which describe ways of being with non-human species and environmental processes that relate to non-normative embodiment and critical, reparative politics. Cleo reflects on being in dialogue with species and elements that do not use language, as well as what...

Amsterdam is one of the world's "gay capitals", but how does queer life take place there? Like other large cities, Amsterdam features a variety of spaces for LGBTQ+ people, each with its own set of norms, socio-economic priorities, imagined client groups and distinct feels. In this episode, Avery Franken shares her Masters' research project which considers the variety of place-making work undertak...

Academia has a language problem, and the geographies of sexualities are no exception. Whilst the field, at least from my vantage point, is dominated by English scholarship, many worthwhile ideas, concepts and approaches are written and shared through other languages. In this episode Dr. Karin Duplan from the University of Geneva reflects on how she has worked to bridge Francophone geographies of s...

The metaphor of the closet is perhaps one of the strongest narrations of queer life. The Gay Liberation Front famously commanded queers to come "out of the closets and into the streets". But what are the limitations of closet-thinking? Who does it include and exclude in its imaginaries? And what is the geography of the closet? In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Ale Boussalem from the University of...