Co-steward
Sam (they/them) is an eco-social researcher, essayist, poet, editor, educator and land steward in training. Their work is devoted to opening perspectives that restore life-bearing ways of living and loving from within colonialism’s ruins, and to dismantling modern binaries, supremacies and separations across forms and scales.
For 25 years, Sam channeled this work through teaching, research and activist scholarship as a professor of sociology, critical and queer theory, and education. Today, their scholarship and art-life practice orbit around bringing decolonial systems thinking, queer ways of knowing and land-based ecology together to facilitate processes of depth de-institutionalization and reanimation. By applying queer ecology to human relations and the development of ‘translanding’ practices, they invite deep diagnoses of the roots of colonial violence across scales and proposals for its disintegration. In the summer of 2025, following two life-changing wildfires in their home territories, they embarked on a spiritual-political, scientific and practical apprenticeship with fire.
Sam was born into a lineage of white Anglo-European settler-colonial ancestry and grew up in Delaware (US) on the ancestral land of the Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke peoples. They live transversally in Lisbon and the Alva Valley in Portugal, and can be found online at http://sarahamsler.com and @ssamsler.

Co-steward
Ruth Charnock is a queer writer, editor, artist, mother, lapsed academic, creative facilitator, researcher and tarot reader based in Lincoln, U.K. Her background is in academia and she worked as a lecturer teaching literature, critical theory and cultural studies for over 10 years before leaving the university in 2019. Now, she writes and makes art about queer embodiments, popular music, feelings, subjugated knowledges [particularly witchcraft and tarot] and institutional knowledge making. Much of her work is concerned with how we can loosen our institutional ties and become less disciplined. She is part of the multi-modal collaboration Witching the Institution with Dr Karen Schaller. She also supports writers, artists and academics who feel ill-placed within institutional settings through divinatory, somatic and narrative work. She is the author and editor of various academic works on music, literature, and affect including Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings, and is the author of creative non-fiction in Blood and Cord: Writing New Parenthood and Hyped on Melancholy. More recently, she has also started work as a visual scribe. You can find her at www.ruthcharnock.com and @ruthcharnock on Instagram.