Tales from Camp Wilde: Queer(y)ing Environmental Education Research (Revisited)

Following Constance Russell, Tema Sarick, and Jacqueline Kennelly’s (Can J Environ Educ 7(1):54–66, 2002) pioneering foray into the generative possibilities of mobilizing queer theorizing in environmental education, we were encouraged to follow them a short time later with our own collaborative explorations of this academic territory (Gough et al., Can J Environ Educ 8:44–66, 2003) in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education (CJEE) on “Exploring New Genres of Inquiry in Environmental Education Research,” and we are now pleased to revisit this work. The first part of this chapter is a reprint of that 2003 article. We explore some possibilities for queer(y)ing environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field’s heteronormative constructedness. These stories suggest alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)producing both the subjects/objects of our inquiries and our identities as researchers. At the end, we offer some brief reflections on Camp Wilde’s inception and reception, together with some speculations on where we might go next.