“How to Love an Oyster: Chemistry, Slippage, and Attachment”

Megan Hayes, PhD candidate, Environmental Studies and 2023–24 OHC Dissertation Fellow. 

My project moves through several social, cultural, and environmental milieu to conceptualize love through human-oyster relations. I take up the matter of love as a force—and not always a benevolent one—to consider how it gives shape to futures of collective flourishing. Together with their interlocutors in a number of watery field sites, my primary research companion in love will be the oyster: a generous ecological inhabitant whose love has so often been unrequited.