Nick Koenig

Research

Values

Because of my eternal indecisiveness, my research training has dappled in weird collection of research frames, disciplines, and methods, but no matter what, the values I bring to research:

  • Foregrounding community voices, desires, and knowledge
  • Profound fascination and love of plant life
  • Justice-oriented of envision futures
  • Education-forward in research process
  • Being playful and silly outside (most important)!
Frames

The frames I ask research questions include anti-colonial studies, abolition studies, queer trans feminist studies, multispecies studies, and environmental studies.

Disciplines

While I try to co-create research that disrupts disciplinary boundaries, the disciplines I often think and learn with are political ecology, dendrochronology/tree ring sciences, environmental humanities, botany, critical human and physical geography, narratology, critical pedagogy, and Black geographies.

Methods

Lastly, the methods I leverage depends on the place, people, and plants but has included field notes, collective art and murals, music composition, archives, semi-structured interviews, walking, swimming, focus groups, zines, multispecies ethnography, community mapping, letterpress and object monotype printmaking, drawing, tree coring, various field ecological methods (i.e. transects and plots), herbarium collections, floristic inventories, and phylogenetics.

See publications tab for list of peer-reviewed and public scholarship and below for a thematic breakdown of my work.

Project Umbrellas

Below are the seven project umbrellas that my work has fallen under with some overlap between groups. If you are wanting to collaborate or share aligned work, please email koenignh [at] ucmail.uc.edu (academic) or kentuckynick [at] proton.me (personal).

Climate Change & Justice

Projects included:

  • Climate Liberation is Prison Abolition
  • Introduction to Incarcerated Student Voices in Climate Change Short Story Fiction
  • Fossil Fueled Transphobia: Link Anti-Trans Rhetorics with Fossil Fuel Capital
  • Apartheid Archives and Student Divestiture at University of Idaho

Dendrochronology

Projects included:

  • Provocations of Tree Ring Narratives: Dendronarratology, Trans Material Narratology, and the Ecology of Narratives
  • From Ring to Records: Refining the Construction Date of a Historic Cabin near Hamilton, Montana
  • Hydroclimatic Coherence and Elevation Tradeoffs in Pinus flexilis Growth Across the Greater Yellowstone Region since 750 CE
  • Tree Ring Student Spring Break: Creative Pedagogical and Research Methods in Dendrochronology
  • Dendrocuinisology: Recipes to Fuel the Fieldwork

Queer Trans Feminist Geographies

Projects included:

  • Queering Feminist Geography Collective (See Publications)
  • Resisting Gender Fascism
  • Transcalar Triptych
  • Trans Field Notes Collective
  • Queering Dendrochronology Collective (See Picture)
  • Queering the Research Lab
  • Rural Drag

Critical Geography & Political Ecology

Projects included:

  • Critical Physical Geography Decade in Review
  • Chestnut Epistemologies: Emotional Political Ecologies of the American Chestnut’s Extinction
  • Crit Geog Forum Roundtable Discussion on the Future of Geographers Inclusion
  • Doing a a PhD Defense Differently: Student Scholarship, Art Showcase, & Sharing Food

Creative Methods & Pedagogy Scholarship

Projects included:

  • Open Syllabus for Introductory Climate General Education: Climate Futures Catalyzing Change
  • Act Like You Live Here: Data Sonification of Global Average Temperature as a Jazz Standard
  • Mischief, care, and heterotopia: Reflections on the potential of zines in geography’s spaces
  • Collective Muraling as Method (See Picture)
  • Creative, In-Class Climate Activities

Environmental Humanities

Projects included:

  • FIRE Starter in Fire Humanities (See Picture)
  • Collective Narration and Collective Climate Liberation
  • The Chestnut Collective: Digital Environmental Humanities, Plant Extinction, and Appalachian Storytelling
  • Navigating a Sense of Place in Landscapes of Crisis: Critical Pedagogies in a Student-Driven Classroom
  • Herbarium Ghosts and Against the Static Herbarium (See Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales)

Botanical Sciences

Projects included:

  • Kentucky Clover Phylogenetics and Systematics
  • Podostemaceae/River Weed Phylogenetics and Systematics
  • Taylor Fork Ecological Area Floristic Inventory