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

Earlier This Year

New Economic Paradigms for Peace and the Planet: Intersectional Feminist Perspectives

Corinna Dengler

Senior Lecturer, Global Political Economy and Development Master's Program, University of Kassel

Patricia (Ellie) Perkins

Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, York University

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko

Senior Research Fellow, Trade Collective

Mariama Williams

Principal, The Integrated Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Managing Director, FromtheInside2theOutside

April 15, 2021

Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the fourth panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.

Our Degrowth Is Intersectional: Feminist Decolonial Pathways for Sustainable Futures

Corinna Dengler, Senior Lecturer, Global Political Economy and Development Master's Program, University of Kassel

This intervention introduces degrowth scholarship and activism and discusses how it can help us to build a new economic paradigm - a paradigm that ventures beyond what Rachel Carson has called the "war on life", a war arising from an economic system that structurally depends on the exploitation of nature, women, and people discriminated against in terms of, for example, class, race, and gender. Having its origins in an ecological critique of our economic system, this talk emphasizes that a degrowth alternative necessarily needs to embrace intersectionality in order to pave the way for socially (and also: gender-) just and ecologically sustainable futures.

Envisioning the Decline of Patriarchy, Race and Capitalism

Patricia (Ellie) Perkins, Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, York University

The current pandemic heightens massive racialized, gendered, class-based, geographic and ecological inequities, with life-and-death consequences for millions. How, at what point -- or is it even possible -- to repudiate and replace the systems behind this catastrophe, while climate chaos looms? How to distinguish transformative actions from those which just help the current systems to reinvent themselves? I suggest some ideas grounded in wellbeing, care, and stabilizing feedbacks.

Addressing COVID-Nomics and Its Implications to Transform the World from an Afrikan Feminist Perspective

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Senior Research Fellow, Trade Collective

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses of capitalism as an economy and polity and revealed the huge potential of post-capitalism. Afrikan feminist scholars, activists, researchers have collectively critiqued current market orthodox models of macro and micro economics made with ongoing forms of colonialism, including colonialisation of natural resources, of the economy, of political relations, and of health provision.

Integrating Mindfulness, Social Sustainability and Just Transitions Issues into National and Global Climate and Economic Policy and Practice

Mariama Williams, Principal, The Integrated Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Managing Director, FromtheInside2theOutside

The current pandemic is revelatory about how deeply unequal, imbalanced and unjust our societies are. In the face of the inextricably linkage between Covid-19 and climate change, there are tremendous lessons to be learned. Where do we go? Is the ‘building-back-better’ mantra ultimately the way or can we think of ways of incorporating ‘mindfulness’ and related approaches to human provisioning and thriving, if indeed we seek to contribute to more robust and life-enhancing economic analyses and policy-relevant practices in the context of just transitions and sustainable development.

Moderated by Suzanne Bergeron, Helen M. Graves Collegiate Professor of Women's Studies and Social Sciences at University of Michigan-Dearborn

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This speaker series is cosponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Philosophy Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept; Human Rights Minor; and the Honors College.

The Climate Crisis, Gender, and Prospects for Sustainable Peace

Kavita Naidu

International Human Rights Lawyer and Consultant, Edith Cowan University

Bernadette P. Resurrección

Associate Professor, Global Development Studies Department; Queen's National Scholar in Development in Practice, Queen's University

April 8, 2021

Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the third panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.

How Can Development Justice Tackle the Climate-COVID Crisis to Ensure Sustainable Peace?

Kavita Naidu, International Human Rights Lawyer

Development Justice is a transformative framework that aims to reduce inequalities between countries, between rich and poor and between women and men to challenge the existing hyper-growth, profit driven extractivist model of economic development that perpetuates the climate-covid crisis. The alarming lack of political will to protect our ecosystem and eradicate inequalities of wealth, power and resources and uphold human rights is threatening sustainable peace. This global agenda is curated and influenced by mega corporations, undermining any accountability that governments may have towards people.

Green and Climate-Responsive Technologies: Mismatches with Everyday Gendered Lives

Bernadette P. Resurrección, Associate Professor, Global Development Studies Department; Queen's National Scholar in Development in Practice, Queen's University

Due to the urgency of the climate and disaster crisis, science and technology are now being touted as a benign force and key to enabling green transformations. Science and technology efforts are thus being designed to make climate change and its effects more intelligible and thus, manageable. From feminist political ecology and STS perspectives, I aim to unpack how science and technology ‘lands’ in climate policy environments setting in motion ‘messy’ gender power dynamics re/producing exclusions, injustice, disquiet and hegemony. Through brief examples in Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam, I highlight how technical climate solutions may sidestep or even reproduce the same drivers that steered climate catastrophes, inequality, and unrest that dramatically prompted us to pursue such solutions in the first place.

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This speaker series is cosponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Anthropology Dept; Communications Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Philosophy Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept; Human Rights Minor; and the Honors College.

Gender, Race and Climate Justice: National and Global Policy Perspectives

Colette Pichon Battle

Executive Director, Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy

Jacqueline Patterson

Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP

Osprey Orielle Lake

Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International

Anita Nayar and Camden Goetz

Director and Coordinator, Regions Refocus

April 1, 2021

Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and the University of Massachusetts Boston Sustainable Solutions Lab for the second panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.

The Climate Crisis and the Sacred Femine

Colette Pichon Battle, Executive Director, Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy

This talk will explore the impacts and roles around solutions that honor the sacred femine. From community organizing to investment strategies, our ability to survive and thrive in this climate reality calls for a rebalancing of global systems from individual, patriarchal, extractive methods to the collective, femine, sustainable values held by frontline communities in the Global South.

[Title TBA]

Jacqueline Patterson, Senior Director, Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP

Feminist Actions Addressing the Climate Crisis and Systemic Change

Osprey Orielle Lake, Executive Director, Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International

Globally women and feminists are building grassroots solutions and transformative climate policy to address interlocking systems of patriarchy, colonization, racism and capitalism. From food sovereignty to forest protection, fossil fuel resistance to feminist climate policies, Indigenous rights to the rights of nature, we are imagining and building the healthy and just world we seek.

Confronting Economic Imperialism: Connections with Struggles against Neo-Colonialism and Patriarchy

Anita Nayar, Director, Regions Refocus and Camden Goetz, Coordinator, Regions Refocus

Drawing on our work to build cross-regional, cross-movement solidarity in the struggle for progressive and feminist economic policy, we will explore connections with struggles in the US against neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and global capitalism. These intersections are shaping our emerging work to confront US economic imperialism, an often unchallenged threat to people and the planet.

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Black Feminist Ecological Perspectives

Kishi Animashaun Ducre

Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University

Tiya Miles

Professor, Department of History, Harvard University

Frances Roberts-Gregory

Future Faculty Fellow, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University

March 11, 2021

Join the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights for the first panel of our Spring 2021 Speaker Series. To join the webinar, Zoom registration is required.

Harriett Tubman is DOPE

Kishi Animashaun Ducre, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Syracuse University

My short presentation focuses on what we can learn about the Black Feminist Spatial Imagination and fugitive geographies from the life and times of Harriett Tubman. I will highlight scholarship on Tubman that emphasizes her contributions to peace and liberation beyond her exploits on the Underground Railroad.

Black Women and the Nature of Fugitivity

Tiya Miles, Professor, Department of History, Harvard University

Early thinkers in the Black feminist literary tradition worked with the materiality and symbolism of nature to imagine as well as to enact free lives. Can their form of environmental consciousness, forged in the fires of slavery, speak to today’s existential threats?

Black Feminist Activist Research for Environmental, Energy, and Climate Justice

Frances Roberts-Gregory, Future Faculty Fellow, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University

Drawing upon my fieldwork eco-memories, I reflect upon the potential for feminist activist research and ecowomanism to address longstanding environmental racism and racialized health disparities in the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

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This webinar is part of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights’ Spring 2021 Speaker Series. It is also affiliated with the Becoming Liberated & Knowledgeable (BLK) Conference, which is organized by students at University of Massachusetts Boston and will take place on February 27, 2021.

This webinar is being co-sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Boston's Africana Studies Department; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of Economics; History Department; Philosophy Department; Political Science Department; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; and the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.

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