PNCA 2025 Symposium: Beyond Boundaries: Visions of Ecological Futures

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 Meech Boakye, 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, and more.

Most events are free and open to the public.

RSVP Required for 3 of the workshops:
1. natural dying with sugar todd
2. Salt Water as a Medium: bioplastics workshop with Meech Boakye
3. Somatic Creative Writing Workshop with Stephanie Adams-Santos

*** 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:

Keynote Lectures:

Friday October 3 at 6pm // Dr. Stacy Alaimo: Marvelously Weird: Deep Sea Creaturely Aesthetics and Oceanic Futures

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.

Saturday Oct 4 at 5pm // Dorothy Lemelson Artist Lecture: Meech Boakye

Meech Boakye is a Canadian-American artist and researcher based in Portland, Oregon. Working across writing, publishing, sculpture, foodways, material research, and public programming, their practice is rooted in relationships with human and more-than-human species. Boakye holds an Hon. B.A. in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Their work has been exhibited at The Brick, Oregon Contemporary, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Gallery 44, and the Art Gallery of Guelph. Their writing and comics have appeared in C Magazine, The Globe & Mail, Oregon Humanities, and Variable West. Supporting their practice, Boakye has received grants from the Simons Foundation, Oregon Humanities, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council, as well as residencies at ACRE, the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and A Black Art Ecology of Portland.

Accessibility
PNCA’s main entrance (west side) includes seven steps and a wheelchair-accessible ramp. The building is ADA compliant, and the Beyond Boundaries exhibition will take place on the main floor. Gender-neutral restrooms are available on the first floor, and service animals are welcome.

Special thank you to the Dorothy Lemelson Foundation for supporting the Dorothy Lemelson Artist Lecture, as part of the Beyond Boundaries symposium!