And

maybe it would make sense to kind of dive into the chapter a bit more deeply.

It's organized around these sort of two spaces from your fieldwork that I think kind of are emphasizing both an aspect of circulation and also of congregation as a key aspect of queer rural geographies.

And so the first one was a car ride with a friend where you discuss, and I'm quoting here from the chapter, how the motions of car space mediates the mutual orientations and pleasures of friendship.

by figuring a progressive forward-moving notion of queer rurality.

So I was hoping if you could sort of talk a little bit about what's happening in that car space, and how does this help us think about queer rurality?

The idea here is that people might be turning up to Divine Liturgy not only to have a good time that night or that week or to hang out with their friends, but also because by turning up to an event that is small and that is only attended by a few dozen people, one's body in that space actually produces a sense of the space's success or of its viability so that together we're also showcasing what rural life could could be in and beyond that space which is why my subtitle for the chapter also talks about a new rural So, yeah, there's a sense that there is a kind of LGBT or queer purpose of the event, but that this can also spill over in dialogue or in commitment to rendering rural cultures more emancipatory as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

So like what in your view are the affordances? And also you mentioned the limitations of taking an approach that is sort of self-consciously specific to place.

Yes, I think for me that comes out of a kind of a long discussion about normativity and about kind of how queer geographers and other queer scholars have sort of understood queer movements and spaces over time and where I think kind of attention to place and sort of the specificities of place has emerged as one kind of antidote, I guess, to either these kind of narratives of sort of queer progress that we were all subjected to for a while, maybe not so much anymore.

Or, on the other hand, the kind of occasionally you can have, I think, academics being a bit heavy-handed with certain critical concepts like homonormativity or something like that, where they can get used in a kind of a contextual way.

And so I think this attention to place kind of emerged as a way, as an alternative to either of those kinds of approaches.

So for me, and I think for a lot of other geographers, maybe not surprisingly, place was kind of a useful place to go in those contexts.

But of course, I think it matters a lot how you're using place.

Obviously, places aren't like self-contained.

Just to close the conversation on the chapter, I also just wanted to ask you more directly, as your work sort of produces academic critique and engages with it, but is also rooted and engages activist critique, do you have any insights or reflections about how this merging or speaking across can function best? In other words, how can critique function at this intersection effectively?