PNCA 2025 Symposium: Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures

Join us for a three-day convening of critical and creative voices exploring ecological thought across disciplines and communities.

Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures

Portland, Oregon // October 2–4, 2025

Join us for Pacific Northwest College of Art's 2025 Symposium, Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures, a three-day convening of critical and creative voices engaging ecological thought across disciplines and communities. Featuring keynote lectures from scholar Dr. Stacy Alaimo and artist Meesh Boyake, this symposium explores the intersections of environment, art, activism, pedagogy, and identity—with a focus on how ecological futures are imagined, embodied, and enacted through diverse cultural practices and positionalities.

Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures will encompass a diverse array of programming including keynote lectures, panel conversations, workshops, a group art exhibition, poetry readings and more. Details and full schedule coming soon! RSVP for updates.

All events are free and open to the public.

*** Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures ***

Ecological thinking foregrounds the interdependence of all life—human and non-human, material and affective, theoretical and grounded. Beyond Boundaries seeks to foster dialogue around ecology as a generative framework for creating just, embodied, and intersectional futures.

How might we challenge dominant understandings of "Nature"? In what ways do relationships—with environments, bodies, technologies, and communities—inform our ecological imaginations?

This year’s symposium encourages participants to reflect on how ecological entanglements shape and are shaped by lived experience, artistic practice, and political struggle. We are especially interested in work rooted in feminist, queer, trans, Indigenous, Black, and disabled approaches to ecological thought (Alaimo 2010; Tsing 2015; Haraway 2003; Wynter 2003; Clare 2017; Bey 2022).

Keynote Lecturers:

Dr. Stacy Alaimo

Professor Stacy Alaimo is the Moore Professor in English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She researches and teaches across the environmental humanities, science studies, animal studies, American literature, cultural studies, gender theory, and critical theory, focusing, more specifically, on developing models of new materialism, material feminisms, environmental justice, and, most recently, the blue (oceanic) humanities. Her work explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and philosophical approaches to environmentalism along with the practices and experiences of everyday life.

Her publications include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space(Cornell, 2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana 2010), which won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment book award for Ecocriticism; and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minnesota 2016). She co-edited Material Feminisms(2008) with Susan J. Hekman, edited the 28-chapter volume Matter (2016) in the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, and edited a special volume of Configurations on Science Studies and the Blue Humanities. Dr. Alaimo has published more than 60 scholarly articles, chapters and other essays on such topics as gender and climate change, queer animals, anthropocene feminisms, marine science studies, blue humanities, material ecocriticism, and new materialist theory.

Meesh Boyake

Meech Boakye is an artist and writer based in Portland, OR. Boakye's practice engages in collaborations with multispecies kin ranging from biomaterial research to digital gardens to fermentation workshops. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, their work has been published in C Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Hard Pack Magazine, and Mossflower Journal and exhibited at the Art Gallery of Guelph, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Trinity Square Video and Xpace Cultural Centre. Boakye was named one of Everpress's Artists to Watch in 2022, also receiving a Make|Learn|Build award from the Regional Arts & Culture Council that same year.
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