COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities

Description

Form x Content’s Semester 2 program commences with academics Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, who discuss their collaborative research and reading group COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities. Convened by Dr Djuke Veldhuis, Monash University.

Composting is a domestic labour whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil in order to grow something new. Drawing on this material metaphor, we began ‘COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities’ as a collaborative research project in 2015. Initiated as a way to examine how feminist ideas were (or weren’t) being taken up in emerging environmental research, this project expanded to include a forum for para-academic discussion, a place to imagine different ways of working in a neoliberal higher education sector in crisis, a methodology of conversation and exchange across difference, and a reminder that issues of gender, race, colonialism, sexuality and ability are always integral to figuring out how to live in a climate-changed world.

About the panel

Dr Jennifer Mae Hamilton currently lives and works on Anaiwan Country, where she is a senior lecturer in English literary studies at the University of New England. She has scholarly training in literary and gender studies and professional experience in creative and community arts. Drawing on her diverse interdisciplinary training in a forthcoming book titled Weathering the City, she reads live art, urban resilience policy, eco-live art, Australian literature and poetry, popular television series and memoir through queer feminist and anti-colonial lenses to produce new ways of understanding climate adaptation. Together with Astrida Neimanis, she co-founded the COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities reading group in 2015.

Associate Professor Astrida Neimanis is a writer, teacher and researcher working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Mixing cultural theory and practice-based methods, and often in collaboration with artists, scientists, educators and other practitioners, her work seeks to tell different kinds of stories about water, weather, bodies and feeling. She is author of many publications, including Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017). Neimanis is currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, where she also is Director of the FEELed Lab. Together with Jennifer Mae Hamilton, she is co-convenor of the COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities reading and research group, and one of the founders of the Weathering Collective.

Dr Djuke Veldhuis directs the Bachelor of Science Advanced—Global Challenges course at Monash University and is passionate about engaging with the intersection of science and society. From assessing intergroup environmental dilemmas in Alaska to documenting the effects of rapid environmental and cultural change on human health in Papua New Guinea or tracking human prehistory in the Libyan Sahara, she thrives on tackling interdisciplinary research questions. Veldhuis’s academic background is in biological anthropology with a focus on health and human behaviour. Consequently, her research involves analyses with a combination of qualitative and quantitative data and a variety of statistical techniques. Veldhuis’s research projects in Papua New Guinea and Alaska both involve extensive bilateral engagement with NGOs, health professionals and community leaders to build up local capacity and trust.

Read related article here: Hamilton, J.A, Neimanis, A (2018): ‘Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities’, Duke University Press