Consortium Speaker Series

The Consortium's Speaker Series brings an international roster of frontline practitioners, reflective activists and engaged scholars to University of Massachusetts Boston's campus. Their talks address the complex realities of women’s and men’s lives and livelihoods in conflict-affected areas, the challenges of trying to bring feminist commitments into security policy and humanitarian practice, and the ways in which gender analysis can and must transform resolutely “gender-blind” paradigms of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Information about Upcoming Speaker Events, Events Earlier This Year, and Past Speaker Events is available here. You can find videos or transcripts of these events, when available, under Consortium Lectures.

Upcoming Speaker Events

Examining False Solutions to Climate Change: A Postcolonial Feminist Perspective and a Hopeful Inquiry

Shehla Arif
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Mount Union

March 28, 2024
12:30pm - 1:45pm

Hybrid - Ballroom B (U03-3550B Campus Center), University of Massachusetts Boston. For in-person attendance:

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Description: In this talk, Shehla Arif will critically examine techno-fixes to climate change; “fixes” which are being proposed by the same entities that caused the climate crisis in the first place. She will demonstrate how these techno-fixes, which continue to prioritize growth and profit, constitute false solutions to the climate crisis. Considering the climate crisis’ disproportionate, gendered adverse impact on the poor and the marginalized of the globe, Dr. Arif will show how the violence against the planet is inextricably linked with the violence against the people and is conducted through epistemic violence that erases Indigenous and ancestral knowledges. However, by relearning how ancient civilizations such as the Indus Valley civilization lived in harmony with nature, and by attending to knowledge generated by social movements across the globe, it is possible to chart a path toward solutions that support people, planet and life.

Register here for the Zoom webinar (registration required). 

The End of Nature and the Human: A Global South Ecofeminist Approach to the Anthropocene

Abigail Pérez Aguilera
Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management, The New School

April 11, 2024
12:30pm - 1:45pm

Hybrid - Ballroom A (U03-3550A Campus Center), University of Massachusetts Boston. For in-person attendance:

RSVP

Description: Increasing climate catastrophes and attacks on Global South environmental activists, land defenders and Indigenous land rematriation movements: all of these have exposed the limits of the paradigms of modernity and progress derived from the settler colonial system. Abigail Perez Aguilera will show how Global South struggles against nature depredation and forced displacement challenge the dominant conception of the relationships between humans and nature that are found in Anthropocentric approaches. She argues that ecofeminist approaches from the Global South offer alternative ways of living and being, by aiming to overcome capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism through a reconfiguration of the concept of the human, and our (multiple) relations to nature. She presents these approaches as testimonies of the multiple ways to fight against climate injustice, survive the Anthropocene and create a long-term alternative for a human-nature relationship beyond domination.

Register here for the Zoom webinar (registration required).

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