Pride of Place

In conjunction with World Pride 2023, join us for an evening examining the built environment at its intersection with LGBTQ+ people. Our panel is drawn from practitioners and academics in this space and the evening is designed to engage the audience in the discussion.

Moderator 
Dr Kane Race 
Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies
University of Sydney

Panelists
Dr Simona Castricum 
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow 
University of Melbourne 
Producer, Musician 

Dr Stephen Collier
Architect
Director, Stephen Collier Architects

Sophie Dyring 
Architect 

Dr Jason Prior 
Professor of Planning, Health and Environment
UTS 

Biographies 
Dr Kane Race is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has explored gay sexual and social practices in the context of urban, technological, biomedical and historical change. He is the author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: the queer politics of drugs (Duke UP 2009), The Gay Science: intimate experiments with HIV (Routledge, 2018) and The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies, co-edited with M. Hardie and M. Morris (Indiana UP, forthcoming).

Dr Simona Castricum is a multidisciplinary creative and academic working in music and architecture on Wurundjeri land of Kulin Nation. Simona is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, and is a musician and producer. Simona’s speculative creative practice explores queer and trans fictions, reimagining radical relationships between the tactile, virtual, and affective conditions of gender and sexual nonconformity.

Dr Stephen Collier has been a practicing architect for over 30 years. His career started in Europe working for influential architects, including Manuel de Solà-Morales and Willem Jan Neutelings (Neutelings Riedijk Architects). For the last 15 years Stephen has been running his own practice in Sydney during which time he has tried to build a bridge between academia and practice. His PhD, completed as part of the practice-by-research program at RMIT University, was on the nexus between identity (including sexuality and mental health) and architecture. Stephen is interested in how queer architects, like himself, often think about space in terms of how it embraces or excludes and how it protects. His practice is informed by his sexuality and his battles with PTSD and depression.

Sophie Dyring, Director Schored Projects, is a multi-award-winning architect and landscape architect with over twenty-five years’ experience. With a strong a sense of social equality she heads up a respected, inclusive, queer and/or female majority studio that supports flexibility. Sophie uses practice as advocacy for a better, fairer and a more accessible society. This includes appointments on the NSW State Design Review Panel and Office for Design and Architecture SA design review panel. Her work has been published in Thames and Hudson books as well as multiple magazines and newspapers.

Dr Jason Prior is Professor of Planning, Health and Environment at the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF), University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Jason is also the lead of the cross-university Healthy Urban Environments (HUE) Clinical Academic Group in Maridulu Budyari Gumal: Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research and Enterprise (SPHERE) and co-convenor of the Climate Change and Health Collaborative within the Research Institute for Innovative Solutions for Wellbeing and Health (INSIGHT) UTS. As an architect, planner, and geographer, Jason's research program focuses on the environment, planning, and human and planetary health. A focus of Jason’s research is on the health and wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ communities, with a recent report exploring how public spaces can be made more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ individuals, families and communities through urban policy and practice. Currently, Jason is leading research aimed at providing planning guidance across the Six Cities Region, which generates social and physical infrastructure that supports inclusive places for LGBTQIA+ individuals, families and communities. Jason has led 47 national and international research projects through productive collaborations with research organisations, government, industry, NGOs, communities and the professions. His research has been published widely in various journals, edited collections, and through public reports and interactive tools. Jason is also a member of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity Leadership Board.