Symposium: What is a Queer Methodology?

Åsa Johannesson is an artist working across photography, installation, and writing. Her practice concerns the relationship between queerness, representation, and material knowledge production. She has exhibited her work internationally, including at Centrum för fotografi (Stockholm), Queer Britain (London), Landskrona Foto (Landskrona) and FutureLab (Shanghai). Åsa’s work has been written about in the books Photography: A Queer History and Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism, and the journals Philosophy of Photography, British Journal of Photography, Yes & No, and Zine. She is based in London, UK and her hometown Växjö, Sweden.

With her writing Åsa intersects theoretical concepts from feminist and queer theory, new materialism with the logic of studio practice. Her first book, the research monograph Queer Methodology for Photography, was published by Routledge in February 2024. Recent essays include ‘Theorising Skin: Queer Readings of Photography’ and ‘Nonbinary Difference: Dionysus, Arianna, and the Fictive Arts of Museum Photography’ (co-written with Clair Le Couteur). Åsa has written about her photographic practice for Ilford. Her first collection of poetry, And I wanted to see it: my queerness in the best light, is a collaborative work produced together with her sitters and is forthcoming (publisher TBC).

Dr Nicky Coutts is an artist, researcher and writer. She is currently Research Lead in the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art having been PGR Research Lead, MRes Pathway Leader and Research Tutor in the School of Fine Art and Humanities at the Royal College of Art (2012-2022). She completed a PhD in Photography at the RCA in 2001 and was an Associate Lecturer in MA Photography at LCC (2011-2016), Postdoctoral Fellow at Middlesex University (2004-2009), Commissioning Editor of Make, Magazine of Womens’ Art (1998-2000) and Associate Editor of Coil, Journal of the Moving Image (1997-2001).

Laura Guy is a Reader (research) at the Glasgow School of Art. Before joining the GSA in 2015, she held teaching positions at Goldsmiths, University of London, University of the Creative Arts, and Manchester School of Art. She gained her PhD from the Manchester Institute of Research in Art and Design in 2016 and undertook postdoctoral research from 2016-18 at University of Edinburgh. From 2018-21, she was Research Excellence Fellow in Art History at Newcastle University. In 2019-20, she was the Honorary Fellow in Contemporary Art Theory and Curating at Edinburgh College of Art. In 2022, she was Affiliate Fellow in Art History and Critical Studies at the ICI, Berlin.

Brooke Hailey Hoffert (they/them) is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Glasgow. They are a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School of Art, holding an MA in History of Art from University College London and an MLiB in Curatorial Practice from Glasgow School of Art. Their current research examines speculation, temporality, fluidity, futurity, queer and trans embodiment, and inclusive curatorial practices through a queer and feminist approach.

In 2022, they founded the curatorial platform FEMME to explore queer and trans communities in the Southern United States. Now residing in Glasgow, they continue their curatorial work through FEMME, emphasizing critical practice that fosters fluid, dialogical collaboration, creating spaces where connection and curiosity thrive.

Jane Topping (she/her) is an artist and lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art. Her interdisciplinary practice meddles with science fiction and horror, the archive and the screen, hysteria, nostalgia and cats, sometimes meandering towards autofiction or delving into the literature and lives of writers, including Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999).

Recent outings for her practice include the publications React! React! React! (Good Press, 2025) & Shit Hair (2024), conference The Cloud of Unknowing: Encounters with the UFO Phenomenon (Mildred’s Lane, New York, 2024) solo exhibition Drew Barrymore’s Island Hotel from Hell (Patricia Fleming, Glasgow 2023), Queereal Secretions (Annex Gallery, GSA, 2023), Fiction Machines IV (Bath School of Art, Film & Media, 20 July 2023), Feminist Histories of the Future (Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2023), Murky Waters (Edinburgh, 2022), The Immaterial Salon (Marseilles, 2022), Gothic Nature Journal III: Haunted Shores (2022) and The Influencing Machine (nGbK, Berlin, 2018).

Topping gained her PhD in Fine Art Practice in 2021 with the thesis: The Peter & nou Handbook: A Field Guide to an SF Practice (So Far).

Topping’s video Peter won Best PKD Short at The Fifth Annual Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival, New York, 2017. Topping was a recipient of a Hospitalfield summer residency (Arbroath 2017) and was on the jury of the No Budget Competition at the 32nd Hamburg International Short Film Festival (2016).

Born and based in Glasgow, Michelle Hannah is an artist, writer and performer. Their practice delves into the excavation and exhumation of queer dystopia through disembodied sound, post-photography, speculative texts, moving image, and vocal performance. Current interests draw on the dark forest theory, post-digital artefacts, class politics, and parapsychology to explore thresholds of collapse, futurity, consciousness and ruin.

They have exhibited and performed at: Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh, HOME Manchester, CGP London, ZKU Berlin, DCA Dundee, BALTIC Newcastle, Minsheung Art Museum Shanghai, Artlicks London, Take Me Somewhere Glasgow, Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, Suttie Arts Aberdeen, GOMA Glasgow, The Royal Standard Liverpool, ESW Edinburgh, The Cooper Gallery Dundee, Dresden Film Festival, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts, TULCA Festival Galway, British Art Network, Lux Scotland and has curated events for the Glasgow Film Festival, defunct nightclub ROST, No Bounds Radio and other speculative ventures.