Simon Turner
| Degrees: | B.A. (Hons.) (Trent University), M.A. (Carleton University) |
| Email: | simonturner@cmail.carleton.ca |
Simon Turner is a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University. Their research examines configurations of kinship outside family relations, arguing that they expose the fault lines of neoliberal identity politics. Bringing into dialogue diverse texts from across the past century, their work builds on intersectional kinship discourses to study a broad array of alternative kinships, such as those formed by queer “chosen families,” Black diasporic networks of belonging, and communities based on artistic practices.
Their doctoral project uses the ethos expressed by the works of queer British modernist author and social commentator E. M. Forster as a lens for interpreting how the ethical investments shared by multiple media depicting queer, Black, and trans lives address the problematics of identity today, while also speaking back to the issues with which Forster wrestled in his time.
They also study the ways aesthetic forms themselves can model alternative kinship relations through narrative structure or media composition. In creating an interdisciplinary dialogue between diverse texts, this project interrogates the texts’ aesthetics and ethics alongside their production and reception to consider the lines of kinship that form within, across, and in the process of creating these narratives, in turn exploring the potentials for empathizing with others regardless of sharing an identity label.
Alongside academia, Simon Turner is a multiform creative writer, having been published as a poet (Plenitude Magazine; bird, buried press) and short fiction writer (in We Shall Be Monsters, Renaissance Press) and had four of their plays staged either at or in collaboration with The Theatre on King (Peterborough, ON).