About The Strange Familiar

Pragmatically hopeful dispatches from a troubled planet: not doom, not denial—analysis at the unlikely junctions where culture, power, and everyday life collide. Through an intersectional transfeminist sociological lens, we go looking for the strange that’s hiding in the familiar.

A Project from Iris Soleil

Welcome in. I’m Iris Soleil (they/them).

Fall 2025 marks the start of a sociology PhD, grounded in a prior MS in Postsecondary Adult and Continuing Education—years spent deep in how adults learn, change, and make meaning. Before that came a BA in Sexuality, Gender & Queer Studies with a Spanish minor, alongside work with the Disability Resource Center and service on the Queer Resource Center advisory board.

My own story began in a small, conservative, high‑desert town of the inland Pacific Northwest where college was a distant, unreachable rumor and queerness went unnamed. Being a queer, gender‑expansive kid without words for self or future leaves marks—and now motivates.

Cities, time, and stubborn hope did their work. Corporate tech gave way to coming out, months of volunteering at the LGBTQ community center, and a committed return to higher education.

I am an educator and scholar; public intellectual and academic professional; photographer and writer; editor, organizer, activist, event producer, poet. I love travel, books, and music (with the occasional DJ set for good measure).

The Pacific Northwest is home—on lands of Indigenous peoples who have cared for these places for more than 11,000 years. They live here still, despite centuries of genocide, land theft, and oppression. I honor and respect them and this land.

If this project speaks to you, add your voice. Let’s think together—and act where we can.

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