“WE ARE THE ECOSEXUALS. The Earth is our lover.”  — Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, The Ecosex Manifesto

The Graduate Students of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University are proud to announce our biennial conference, to be held on April 17–18, 2026. We are pleased to host keynote speaker Heather Davis (The New School). 

We invite contributions that engage with the concepts of ecosexuality and queer ecologies. Rooted at the intersection of art, sexuality, and environmental activism, ecosexuality reimagines the Earth not as a passive "mother" to be protected, but as a passionate lover with whom we can engage intimately and ethically. This framework offers a radical alternative to dominant environmental discourses, emphasizing joy, celebration, sensuality, and love as catalysts for ecological awareness and action. Through embodied, immersive, and pleasure-centered practices, ecosexuality seeks to foster deeper connections between humans and the more-than-human world. 

Building on the work of thinkers such as Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Kim TallBear, Greta LaFleur, Mel Y. Chen, Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Heather Davis, this conference asks how pleasure, desire, and relationality might open new pathways for environmental ethics, aesthetics, and politics. How can intimacy with the nonhuman world reconfigure our notions of kinship, care, and responsibility? What can queer theory and ecocriticism learn from each other when eros becomes ecological? 

This conference seeks to situate ecosexual and queer ecological perspectives in conversation with other intellectual and political traditions—Indigenous studies, Marxist ecology, postcolonial theory, and more. How might ecosexual approaches challenge, complement, or complicate these frameworks? What can they reveal about desire, land, kinship, and the colonial politics of extraction? How might attending to pleasure and intimacy grapple with the enduring violences of settler colonialism, and how might Indigenous thinkers reframe or trouble ecosexual imaginaries? 

In the interdisciplinary spirit of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, we invite papers from graduate students in the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, film and media studies, philosophy, religious studies, classical studies, history, art history, anthropology, sociology, political science, ethnomusicology, and any other relevant field in the humanities or social sciences. We especially encourage perspectives engaging with Black ecologies, ecofeminism, queer ecology, decolonial ecologies, abolition ecologies, and crip ecologies. Submissions engaging archival materials, creative practice, speculative thinking, or comparative approaches across disciplines are warmly welcomed. This conference aims to cultivate a community of collaborators.  

Please submit an abstract (200–300 words), along with a paper title and brief speaker biography, to Anne Merrill at amerri10@jh.edu by January 29, 2026.