Queer suburban place-making, unmaking and remaking with Alison Bain and Julie Podmore

First of all, I'm really interested in where you see yourself in this field of queer and trans geographies and how you might describe it.

So in the introduction to the book, for example, you talk about how this field has changed and also become queer geographies.

So in your own words, where are we in this field and what is it like here?

Okay, I'll begin.

Where are we? It's a burgeoning field.

We were just talking earlier about how many graduate students there are involved in writing dissertations and theses on this topic.

I can also say that in the French world as well, that's going on.

There's so many invitations to, you know, be on committees.

It's really expanding.

Where I situate myself in all of it is somebody who is in maybe the second generation of sexuality in space studies.

So not in the very early iteration, but the next one, which really focused more on geographies of sexualities, at least at the beginning.

But it was this moment where queer geographies was also emerging.

So I feel like I'm continually kind of a more materialist geographer who's inspired by queer ideas.

but very committed to positivism, I guess, and also very interested in archives, which is another big part of my own life.

I've been on the board of the Quebec Gay and now the Quebec Lesbian Archive.

So, yeah, historical slant has always been in there for me.

So this field is dynamic and growing, and I witness it very much as a graduate program director and as a supervisor.

I've had the pleasure of working with some incredible scholars, and increasingly those are trans and non-binary scholars.

And I would say over the last five to 10 years that has really been the case.

And those are the scholars who are reinvigorating queer geographies and making trans studies and trans geographies so much more exciting.

And I think that's where the envelope is being pushed.

And particularly, I've had the pleasure of working with a number of international students.

And those international students are bringing incredible ideas and pushing us to do things differently and inviting different kinds of conversations and really being very critical of where we've come from and saying, look, these are the many different directions that we can go in.

That's the excitement of queer geographies.

I think what's so valuable in working with Julie is that Julie bridges generations.