 |
 |
CALL FOR PAPERS AAG Annual Meeting, 2017, Boston MA, April 5-9 Session: Feminist approaches to a changing climate Organiser: Miriam Burke (Royal Holloway, University of London) “If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively… We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity or not at all” - Val Plumwood (2007:1) Taking inspiration from Plumwood, as well as from Gibson-Graham’s (2011) ‘feminist project for belonging in the Anthropocene’ this session explores the different facets of a feminist approach to climate change and invites speakers to discuss ideas, actions and research around this theme. We are especially interested in presentations that explore how feminist approaches to the ecological crisis engage with bodily, relational, vital, inorganic, sensory and emotional (to name but a few) responses to climate change. Many scholars see binary thinking as deeply implicated in the anthropogenic crisis that is facing life on earth. Dalby (2013: 40) argues that ‘the modern assumption of nature as separate from humanity, of the environment as an external element of the human condition, were never a very accurate portrayal of life in the biosphere’. Critiques - from feminist scholars and others - of hyper-separation are pushing us to move beyond the divisive binaries of human/ non-human, subject/ object, economy/ ecology and thinking/ acting (Gibson-Graham 2011). However, in mainstream discourse around climate change, concepts such as technological fixes, carbon budgets and idealised CO2 levels appear to reinforce binary ideas of a predictable and independent global system. Feminist responses from geography and beyond have critiqued many aspects of the study of and action on climate change. For example, Nancy Tuana (2013) applied Donna Haraway’s (1989) insights into the supposed ‘value neutrality’ of western science to the ways in which climate change data is created and disseminated. Julie Nelson (2007) took a feminist approach in her critique of the Stern Report in which she argued that connections to others and the environment are integral parts of human life and cannot be ‘discounted’ by mainstream economics. Scholars have investigated the intersectional impacts of climate change as it occurs to gender, race and ethnicity; while others have critiqued assumptions in which women and children are seen as either virtuous or passive victims, thus obscuring their resilience, agency and situated knoweldges (for example Arora-Jonsson, 2011, Glazebrook, 2011 and for an overview, Moosa and Tuana 2014). And while Jane Bennett (2009) is not talking about climate change per se, her work on vital materialism stresses the need to take seriously dynamic earthly matters and their bodily counterparts. These critiques carry important ethical implications in addressing a world that is more interdependent and nuanced than traditional binary ideas would have us believe. As the climate changes, so too must societies - either proactively, reactively or both. Naomi Klein (2014) suggests that one way to look at climate change is as an opportunity: an opportunity to overhaul inequalities in global society in order to save both our own species and others. Engagement with feminist ethical theories, which acknowledge histories of exploitation and cultivate ethical and social ecological relationships, may offer some useful tools as we continue further on this journey (Cuomo 2011). With this in mind, we invite the submission of papers that address the topic of climate change from a feminist perspective. We welcome a range of approaches and creative presentation as well as interdisciplinary scholarship and practice. Topics could include, but are not limited to: - Theoretical approaches that engage with bodily, relational, vital, inorganic, sensory, emotional, haptic, (to name a few) responses to climate change. - Critiques of hyper-separation and ideas that move beyond mainstream and binary approaches to climate change. - Intersectional critiques, and those which take as the norm that women, men, children and nonhumans are not two dimensional actors; they are resilient, interconnected, they have agency and important situated knowledges. - Feminist climate governance, community based studies, cultural experience of climate change, exploration of creative methods and many more… Please send your expressions of interest to Miriam Burke ([log in to unmask]) in the form of a 250 word abstract by Monday October 17th 2016. The session will be finalised by October 20th and respondents contacted no later than this date. Please note that October 27th is the AAG deadline for abstract submissions and November 17th is the deadline for sessions.