Composting (in) the gender studies classroom: Growing feminisms for climate changing pedagogies

Abstract

Drawing on our experience co-teaching an undergraduate unit called “Gender and Environment,” we argue for an expansive feminist approach to teaching climate change that embodies the content of the unit in its classroom practice. This requires: (a) understanding the classroom not as separate from the phenomenon of climate change but as one of its sites, striated by the diverse bodies, histories, and other materialities that comprise it; (b) a rigorous understanding of climate change as a feminist issue, inseparable from crises of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchal power, and violent body normativities; and (c) a commitment to responsive and accountable pedagogies. Here, the feminist environmental humanities concept and method of “composting” (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018) helps describe how environmental matters can be mulched together with key social justice concepts and insights in order to nourish new possibilities for climate change pedagogies. Composting thus becomes a metaphoric guide for how we configure the work of teaching climate change—not as masterful dissemination of privileged knowledge but as a co-worlded pedagogy that learns from intersectional, anticolonial, queer, and crip perspectives. This pedagogy thus also contributes to growing more accountable and responsive feminisms within and beyond the classroom. The first half of this article explores how an understanding of both climate change and composting manifest in the context of our co-taught unit. In the second half, we offer a scrapbook—produced with care and joy but necessarily condensed and incomplete—that exemplifies some of the ways that we put this framing into practice.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• feminism
• environmental humanities
• weathering
• pedagogy
• composting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In earlier versions of this article, while we acknowledged the Lands and/or nations of Indigenous authors, we rarely situated white and/or settler authors (apart from ourselves) as such. As Max Liboiron (2021, Michif) has noted, this practice of unmarking “re-centres settlers and whiteness as an unexceptional norm” (p. 3). In this final version, guided by the protocols Liboiron (2021) introduced in Pollution is Colonialism (p. 3), we have attempted to situate at least those authors whose work is pivotal to our arguments here. This is, at times, awkward: while some white and/or settler scholars—such as Verlie—­acknowledge their relations to colonial and racist systems, many have not. Moreover (and thankfully!), there is no universal system of acknowledging cultural or racial position or identity, which means this system lacks consistency. And sometimes we make mistakes. Following the suggestions of Liboiron—thinking with Kim Tallbear’s (Sisston-Wahpeton Oyate) encouragement against perpetuating racist logics of final categorization—where authors have not identified their relations we have noted this as unmarked.

2 To our knowledge, this iteration of the unit did not include any Gadigal people.

3 While beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that these “make-do” classroom tactics are complemented by advocacy and action for structural change to both increase the presence of non-white teachers in higher education and to build non-extractive academic cultures that do not exploit their presence.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan on the unceded lands of the Syilx Okanagan people. Her teaching spans courses the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies program, the Cultural Studies program and the Bachelor of Sustainability program. As director of the FEELed Lab (www.thefeeledlab.ca) her research is situated at the intersection of inclusive feminisms, environmental change, and human-water relations.

Laura McLauchlan

Laura McLauchlan is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW. She is also a lecturer with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Her work focuses both on sociocultural inheritances that can block connection to other lives, as well as on (often marginal) ontologies and practices in mainstream science and policy worlds that might allow for greater responsiveness to the interconnection of life.