POLLEN Biennial Conference 2020, was organised virtually by the ESRC STEPS Centre (IDS/SPRU, University of Sussex) and The Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) Secretariat on September 22-25. This years theme was “Contested Natures: Power, Possibility, Prefiguration” seeking to explore plural natures and futures as sites of struggle and possibility whilst critically engaging with and ‘unpacking’ multiple and overlapping crises of our times.
Dr. Federica Ravera and Dr. Irene Iniesta Arandia, both members of the SEQUAL team, organised a 3 hours long session on “The contested nature of clima change: convergence of feminist and decolonial approaches to explore intersectionality and transformative adaptation”. This special session aimed to summarize some of the feminist and queer proposals that currently question the approaches to climate change adaptation. Feminist studies of science and decolonial feminisms converge in denouncing how positivist and technocratic focus to CC does not take into account how CC is a socio-political and contested subject of research and how such focus makes invisible marginalized voices and knowledge systems. Thus, feminist researchers advocate for exploring novel frameworks, disciplines, knowledges and methodologies to decolonize knowledge production. Additionally, transformative adaptation to CC requires actions that address intersection of exploitative systems of power including queer identities and lived realities as well as non-binary gender’s conception gender. In this sense, the session explored multiple alternatives for transformative adaptive changes to the dominant neoliberal, colonial and patriarchal regimes of truth, power and accumulation that emerge from feminist political ecologies and feminist economies.
Within this session, eight panelists presented their work, including three presentations from the SEQUAL team on the case studies in Burkina Faso, Spain and Norway.
As an outcome of this session an Special issue is been organized in Environmental Science and Policy Journal. Call for papers is now out! We will keep you posted!
