http://grid2016.squarespace.com/

Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialisms

Every day plastic sludge flows into the North Pacific Gyre, extending the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into the digestive systems of fish on up the food chain. As we mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, coastal erosion accelerates, bringing New Orleans closer to the sea and deepening the city's social and cultural fault lines. Global warfare, even after the bombs are dropped, persists in toxic afterlives -- depleted uranium bullets, land mines, chemical run-off -- that leave their mark on both landscapes and bodies.

What is happening to 'nature,' not only as a material world but a symbolic concept, in these places where environmental destruction, economic exploitation, and political injustice converge? Where does the human begin or end, separated from non-human animals, organic material, and technological innovation? This year's GRID seminar, "Gender Matters: Feminist Ecologies and Materialities" begins from the idea that there is nothing especially new about these forms of ecological catastrophe as they unfold across various hierarchies of life, other than a widening scalar reach that now encroaches upon the walls of First-World privilege. We propose to think with and through the history of feminist, anti-racist, and social justice approaches as they have continually developed survival tactics in the face of planetary degradation and immiseration and generated new ways of making livable worlds. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~grid/events/gendermatters_2016.html

Gender Matters will be directed by Prof Aimee Bahng (Dartmouth) in collaboration with GRID Postdoctoral Fellow Max Hantel.