Wet and Wild – Towards A Queer Marine Ecology

The ‘Wet and Wild: Towards a Queer Marine Ecology’ project aims to challenge outdated assumptions, create queer understanding, and celebrate queer diversity in marine scientists and marine ecologies around the world. This project was created by queer ecologist Dr Emily May Armstrong (they/them) and marine phycologist Dr Russell Arnott (he/him) – long term collaborators and lovers of the weird, the wild, and the wonderful. The Wet and Wild project used a lived-experience first and community-creation approach to create a workshop to tour the UK, focusing on pride events seaside towns and areas of high socioeconomic deprivation. 

Queering ecologies as a practice seeks to celebrate and centre different perspectives from different lived experiences, which ultimately creates a more robust and diverse scientific understanding of our marine world. Queer is a verb, and goes far beyond sex and gender – it is to make strange, to trouble, to question, and to create places to thrive and live, in an-otherwise hostile world. 

Queer people are incredibly underrepresented in STEM, even more so in marine biology. There is almost no data on LGBTQIA+ folk in marine eco/bio globally, in terms of careers, outcomes, experiences (DeepSeaNews – 2011!). Equally, 28% of LGBT+ people have considered leaving their STEM jobs because of discrimination or workplace hostility, whereas 28% of queer folk have avoided pursuing a STEM career altogether. This is unacceptable within the scientific community. There are currently no networks of support for LGBTQIA+ marine biologists in the UK – which is shocking considering we’re an island nation full of marine research. Equally, many of our marine research units are based in areas with high levels of multiple deprivation, with minimum engagement or community outreach being done directly within these communities. 

To run our project, we tapped into our broad-reaching scientific community to share our sign-up form – with an emphasis that you only needed to be interested in marine science, not necessarily a scientist already. We received 102 sign ups, with an average of 30 attendees across our three sessions. We had an incredibly diverse range of attendees, from biology teachers to philosophy students to drag performers!

Our first online session presented an introduction to theoretical and practical approaches to queer ecologies, and what that might look like in a marine context. We used interactive approaches to collect ideas, responses, queries, and collective knowledge, which we’ll use to map out perspectives in a publication. Our second session ran in small groups to share personal experiences of queerness, marine biologies and ecologies, and reflect on how to make marine biologies a more inclusive and queer-friendly environment. We used this session to decide on tone of voice, what information to include in our final offering, and what was really important for our audiences. 

Our final session integrated everything we’d discussed throughout the sessions and presented a final lecture/workshop. We spotlighted queer marine ecologists, boundary-defying marine organisms, and focused on the importance of including ‘queer’ hypotheses. 

We’re now in conversation with pride festivals across the UK to bring our Wet and Wild Workshop and Lecture to different events. We hoped to do this for 2025 but missed many of the pitching deadlines due to our co-creation timeline. We had an absolutely brilliant time running such a community driven project, and were thrilled with the amount of interest, curiosity and excitement our project generated. The first Wet and Wild Workshop will be run at Knoydart’s Pride Festival in September 2025 – which is the most isolated part of the mainland UK. 

Combining our queer lived experiences across sciences allowed myself (Emily) and Russell to find new ways to work together, new perspectives on knowledge exchange, and set the scene for on-going collaboration in the future. This project combined all of our favourite things – from weird marine critters, to liberational justice, to climate change, to alternative pedagogies. Without Pride in STEM’s funding, this priming project would not have been possible – and we’re so excited to see where we can take it next.