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Centre for Women's and Gender Research
PhD course鈥

Feminist Visions for Justice in Times of Environmental Crises

This PhD course, organized by InterGender and SKOK, explores feminist visions for environmental justice and offers a framework for thinking about the intersections between feminist theory and environmental justice.

lllustrations in yellow, orange and blue-grey of grain ears, the sky, the sun and mountains, and the text: "What is 'the environment? Except my body. And your body. And the breath between us?"
Image from the artist's comic "30 days of comics/2019: on climate crisis": https://madeleinejubileesaito.net/30-days-of-comics-2019
Photo:
Madeleine Jubilee Saito

Main content

Description

The massive environmental crises such as global climate change, extinction and natural resource depletion, the poisoning of communities through pollution, and the displacement of communities after natural disasters are intimately connected to bodily-bound ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality.

How might we understand such ecological and climate crises, rooted in relations of power, including gender, race, and colonialism through a feminist lens?

This course explores feminist visions for environmental justice, at both local and planetary scales, and offers a framework for thinking about the intersections between feminist theory and environmental justice.

Organizers

Local InterGender course organizer:

Centre for Women鈥檚 and Gender Research (SKOK), University of Bergen, Norway

Course coordinators

InterGender consortium coordinator:

Edyta Just (edyta.just[at]liu.se)

Local InterGender course coordinators:

Redi Koobak (redi.koobak[at]uib.no)

Kari Jegerstedt (kari.jegerstedt[at]uib.no)

Teachers

, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities, University of British Colombia 鈥 Okanagan Campus on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory, Canada

, Assistant Professor, Department of Gender Equality and Social Justice & Department of Child and Family 大象传媒, Nippissing University, Canada

Redi Koobak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Women鈥檚 and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway

Schedule

NB! Time zone: CET

Monday 13 December 2021

12:00-13:00聽聽聽聽聽 Welcome words and introductions

13:00-14:00听听听听听 Lecture: Redi Koobak: 鈥淲hat Might it Mean to 鈥淜now Well鈥? Introduction to Feminist Visions of Collaborative Survival鈥

14:00-14:30 聽聽聽聽 Break

14:30-15:30 聽聽聽聽 Seminar with Redi Koobak

15:30-16:00 聽聽聽聽 Break

16:00-17:00听听听听听 Lecture: Astrida Neimanis: 鈥淲eathering: Feminist Approaches to Climate Catastrophe鈥

17:00-17:15聽聽聽聽聽 Break

17:15-18:15听听听听听 Seminar with Astrida Neimanis

Tuesday 14 December 2021

13:00-15:00听听听听听 Group work with feedback on course participants鈥 papers (three groups)

15:00-16:00聽聽聽聽聽 Break

16:00-17:00听听听听听 Lecture: Ren茅e Valiquette: 鈥淎nthropocenic Reckoning in the Age of Otherness鈥

17:00-17:15聽聽聽聽聽 Break

17:15-18:15听听听听听 Seminar with Ren茅e Valiquette

Wednesday 15 December 2021

13:00-15:00听听听听听 Group work with feedback on course participants鈥 papers (three groups)

15:00-15:15聽聽聽聽聽 Break

15:15-16:00听听听听听 Evaluations

Lecture abstracts and reading lists

Astrida Neimanis

鈥淲eathering: Feminist Approaches to Climate Catastrophe鈥

What does it mean to claim that climate change is a feminist issue? Drawing on the action-concept of "weathering" (Neimanis and Hamilton, 2018), this lecture examines the intersection of climate catastrophe and feminist thinking/practice. We will explore the proposition that a fulsomely feminist approach requires us to understand climate change and the other crises that subtend it as embodied phenomena, where "the weather" is always more-than-meteorological. We will also ask about how understanding weather as a commons can generate feminist insights into questions of difference, solidarity, proximity, strangeness and intimacy, all as part of the fraught project of belonging. To pursue these questions, we will examine feminist, Black, decolonial, crip and queer theories, artworks and non-academic texts.

Reading list

Neimanis, A. 鈥淭he Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism and the Breathless Sea鈥 Australian Feminist 大象传媒, 2019.

Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. 鈥淲eathering: Climate Change and the Thick Time of Transcorporeality鈥 Hypatia, 2013.

Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J. 鈥淲eathering鈥 feminist review, 2018.

Neimanis, A, Hamilton, J. and Zettel, T. 鈥淔eminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering鈥 Australian Feminist 大象传媒 鈥 forthcoming.

Ensor, S. 鈥淨ueer Fallout: Samuel Delaney and the Politics of Cruising鈥 Environmental Humanities, 2017.

Berlant, L.. 鈥淭he Commons: Infrastructure for troubling times鈥澛燛P&D: Society and Space, 2016.

Sharpe, C.聽In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke.

Simmons, K. Settler Atmospherics.聽Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights.

Verlie, B.聽Learning to Live with Climate Change, Routledge, 2021.

Chen, Mel Y. 鈥淔eminisms in the Air.鈥澛燬igns Journal聽(Special Issue on COVID-19, 2020)

Rankine, C. 鈥淭he Weather鈥澛燦ew York Times Review of Books, 2020.

Ren茅e Valiquette

鈥淎nthropocenic Reckoning in the Age of Otherness鈥

Abstract: The temptation for many scholars and activists responding to worsening ecological crises is to advocate for "better" evolutions of Western modernity, to build more muscular environmentalisms that scream and push for unilateral solutions. Such approaches prolong and exacerbate colonial and patriarchal forms of power and politics. Feminist and anti-colonial engagements with the Anthropocene, by contrast, expose the vanity, hostility and profiteering of the 鈥渕odern鈥 project, administered by a form of 鈥渁gency that outstrips its capacity to manage itself, which wrecks, pillages, loots, and destroys, that has very little idea what it is doing鈥 (Bird Rose 2013, 3). Through a feminist, anti-colonial lens, the Anthropocene becomes an 鈥淎ge of Otherness,鈥 a period of necessary undoing, unsettling and reckoning. Ontologically and phenomenologically speaking, feminist notions of otherness better describe the disjunctures, disruptions and unpredictability of current ecological conditions. A posthuman feminist otherness also helps engender better Anthropocenic ethics by emphasizing humility, relinquishment and openness to other(ed) ways of being, thinking and relating. And finally, feminist, anti-colonial otherness nourishes the speculative imagination in order to 鈥渂reathe in the fire,鈥 to fathom and conjure joyful multi-species relationality in and for ruinous times. In recognizing聽 and safeguarding the inalienable othernesses of our present and future, even with all the known destructions and injustices under and on the way, something better remains possible.

Reading list:

Catriona Sandilands,

Joanna Zylinska, (78 pages)

Jemma Deer, (224 pages)

Julietta Singh, (216 pages)

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson,

Redi Koobak

鈥淲hat Might it Mean to 鈥淜now Well鈥? Introduction to Feminist Visions of Collaborative Survival鈥

Inspired by a growing body of work that reconsiders ecofeminist interventions and proposes that we think in terms of newer posthuman futures, this introductory lecture will examine the role of discourses on nature in shaping the situated and site-specific understandings of gender, sexuality, class, and race. We will map out some of the ways in which feminist and queer academics have approached the possibilities and challenges of thinking gendered, sexualised, and raced bodies in and through the environment. We will discuss how these ideas might help us envision ways of 鈥渒nowing well鈥 (Code 1991) in order to work towards justice and 鈥渃ollaborative survival鈥 (Tsing 2018).

Required readings:

Seager, Joni. 2003. 鈥淩achel Carson Died of Breast Cancer: The Coming of Age of Feminist Environmentalism.鈥 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 945-972. (27 pages)

Mann, Susan A. 2011. 鈥淧ioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice.鈥 Feminist Formations 23(2): 1-25- (25 pages)

Tuana, Nancy. 2008. 鈥淰iscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.鈥 In: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 188-213.聽 (25 pages)

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 1-25. (25 pages)

Tsing, Anna, Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. vii-43. (49 pages)

Recommended readings:

Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. 鈥淚ntroduction. Mothers, Natures and Ecofeminists.鈥 and 鈥淎 Genealogy of Ecofeminism.鈥 The Good-natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. xi-27. (36 pages)

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Erickson, Bruce. 2010. 鈥淎 Genealogy of Queer Ecologies.鈥 In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer- Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. Indiana University Press, pp. 1-47. (47 pages)

Gaard, Greta. 2014. 鈥淚ndigenous Women, Feminism, and the Environmental Humanities.鈥 Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 1(3). (15 pages)

Barad, Karen. 2008. 鈥淧osthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.鈥 In: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 120-154. (34 pages)

Haraway, Donna. 1988. 鈥淪ituated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective鈥. Feminist 大象传媒 14(3), pp. 575-599. (24 pages)

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Bionotes

Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. She is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at the University of British Colombia 鈥 Okanagan Campus on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory, in Canada. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book,聽Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology聽is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic, and political connections to other bodies of water. Additional research interests include theories and practice of interdisciplinarity, feminist epistemologies, intersectionality, multispecies justice, and everyday militarisms. Astrida鈥檚 research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, makers, educational institutions, and communities, often in the form of experimental public pedagogies. Her writing can be found in numerous academic journals and edited collections, artistic exhibitions and catalogues, and online media.

Dr. Ren茅e Valiquette (she/her) is a philosopher with interests in an array of overlapping and intersecting areas. Her environmental humanities research uses post-structuralist ideas to rethink and reimagine multi-species relationality. She has been a faculty member at Nipissing University in Canada since 2005, where she teaches in the departments of Gender Equality & Social Justice and Child & Family 大象传媒. In her pedagogical research, Ren茅e advocates for better use of public universities as centres for crises management, spaces where communities can gather and reinvent future life and death. To this aim, Ren茅e, along with her colleague and research partner Dr. Sal Renshaw, developed designed to teach poetic subjectivity, deep collaboration, and immanent ethics. The 2021-2022 offering is hopefully titled DREAMS. Ren茅e also helped found the Network for Teaching and Learning Differently at Link枚ping University in Sweden, where she and Sal will offer the first international iteration of their interdisciplinary course in the Spring, 2022. Ren茅e is also the co-founder of N/NOIR, the Norther/Nordic Organization for Interdisciplinary Research, a research and education group seeking to further collaborative efforts between Canada and Nordic nations. Ren茅e is the 2021 recipient of The Chancellor鈥檚 Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Redi Koobak is a cultural studies scholar working at the intersections between postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theorizing and the discourses of gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality. She is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Women鈥檚 and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen in Norway. She has worked as Assistant Professor in Gender 大象传媒 at Link枚ping University, Sweden and as Visiting Lecturer in Feminist 大象传媒 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Her research interests include feminist visual culture and media studies; intersections of postcolonialism and postsocialism; cultural representations of gender, war, and nationalism; feminist approaches to environmental crises; transnational and local feminisms; and creative writing methodologies. She is the editor, with Madina Tlostanova and Suruchi Thapar-Bj枚rkert, of the volume Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice (Routledge, 2021).

Applications

The application deadline has now passed. PhD students and advanced Master鈥檚 students were eligible to apply.

Applications had to be written in English and include:聽

* name, affiliation, full address, e-mail, phone* name and affiliation of PhD supervisor or MA supervisor* brief CV* description of PhD project or MA project (1-2 pages)* motivation: why do you want to participate in the course (1-2 pages)* please, indicate if you are in the first/middle/last phase of your PhD research or if you are advanced MA student聽

Application deadline: 7 November 2021.

Maximum number of participants: 30