Dr Tilen Kolar is a critical human geographer at the CITY Institute and the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Tilen recently completed his PhD at the University of Leeds (UK) on queer mobilities and spatial scale in Central and Eastern Europe. At 91亚色, he currently works on a project on queer cultural infrastructure and the remaking of inclusive cities with Professor Alison Bain, alongside a comparative study of modalities of queer mobility in the context of infrastructural citizenship and urban rail transportation in Canada, Spain, and India with Professor Patricia Wood.聽
Tilen's work foregrounds semi-periphery as a generative site of geographical theory, challenging metronormative assumptions in queer studies and human geography more broadly.
A central concern in his scholarship is spatial scale and mobilities: how formations such as the hometown, the city, and the nation are at times bodily fragmented and at other occasions narrated through uneven power relations. His past ethnographic fieldwork centred on how queer world-making is navigated and negotiated within these scalar hierarchies through everyday (dis)ordered rhythms, encounters, and infrastructures in Slovenia and other contexts.
His broader interests include queer and trans geographies, infrastructural thinking, corridors, policy mobilities, temporal geographies, decolonising pedagogies, inclusive fieldwork practices, and neurodiverse thinking as a methodological potential.
Kolar has contributed to collaborative research on queer memorialisation, trans-inclusive research design, and mental health in fieldwork. He led the Royal Geographical Society-supported project The State of Queer and Trans Geographies, which responds to contemporary political and institutional pressures facing the field and works to re-centre peripheral knowledges to the disciplinary core.
His research has been published in Mobilities, where he conceptualises the notion of scalar submissiveness through mobile encounters and queer mobilities, in Memory Studies, and Gender, Place & Culture, among others.
He is co-editor (with Alison L. Bain and Julie A. Podmore) of the forthcoming volume Elsewhere and Otherwise: Queering Metropolitan Peripheries (Edward Elgar), and a contributor to the Bloomsbury collection Queer Cultural Infrastructure (Bloomsbury Academic), and Routledge's Queer Memorialisation.
He serves as Co-Chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society, and is committed to challenging how geography is written, read and taught, emphasising the importance of 'other geographies' that emerge when centres (erotic, intellectual, sexual, cultural, and pedagogical) are critically un(desired).
Email: kolart@yorku.ca