Queering speaking and listening in academia

Inspired by the feminist literature on writing and reading differently, this chapter turns attention to speaking and listening. I suggest that queering speaking and listening in academia—problematising and rupturing the existing norms of representing knowledge—works as an ethico-political act that opens up a creative, transformative space for refiguring what counts as viable academic knowledge and for reimaging alternative worlds needed in the current era. I provide two examples of speech acts we have developed in our research project aiming at envisaging multispecies futures. We represent the results of our research in the form of a children’s story, ‘Visiting,’ and an oration, ‘A speech to a mosquito,’ that queer the norms of academic knowledge and invite listeners to reimagine caring relationalities with multiple others.