Tilen Kolar

Tilen Kolar is a critical human geographer at the University of Leeds, where he is completing his PhD on queer mobilities and spatial scale in Central and Eastern Europe.

His work foregrounds the European 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: how formations such as the hometown, the city, the nation, and 'Europe' are at times bodily fragmented and at other occasions narrated through uneven power relations

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Slovenia, he explores how queer world-making is navigated and negotiated within these scalar hierarchies through everyday (dis)ordered rhythms, encounters, and infrastructures.

His broader interests include queer and trans geographies, socio-cultural infrastructures, 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 is currently leading 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 Memory Studies, and he has contributed to Gender, Place & Culture. An article developing his work on power, spatial scale and queer mobilities has been accepted subject to minor revisions at Mobilities.

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 Deputy Secretary 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).