This UWinnipeg Women’s and Gender Studies interdisciplinary, project-based, experiential learning course explores the ways in which feminist theories and art are responding to ecological crises. We dive into the emerging and dynamic contemporary context of scholarship and art that grapples with urgent environmental questions. We also draw on new bodies of scholarship from feminist posthumanities, environmental humanities, ecocultural theory, material feminisms, and anthropocene feminisms. Our feminist engagement involve questioning and engaging with concepts such as entanglement, kin-making, becoming-with, tentacular thinking, string figures, digital citizenship, sympoesis, Anthropocene, Chthulucene, Capitalocene, trans-corporeality, and multispecies solidarity. Students have the opportunity to practice ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway) of environmental crises in order to respond to, engage with, and reflect upon the realities of our current environmental conditions. See below for past course examples, objectives, and work produced.
Fall 2019 Iteration
This course received a University of Winnipeg Experiential Learning Grant which facilitates the opportunity for students to work alongside the artist-researcher collective SWARM and their recently launched Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project, “Swarming the greenhouse artlab: Artistic Encounters with Bee Eco-Cultures in the Age of Chthulucene.” SWARM is informed by queer, feminist, and Indigenous ecological thought, bee eco-cultures, and by the work of artists who have made artwork about bee eco-cultures.
Wor(l)dly Connections – Maram Rocha
“Like most projects, this one’s final form ended up quite differently than its original plan. At first, the intention was to create a comparative analysis, densely focused on finding statistical data to support it. Throughout the term, however, it evolved into an investigation of boundaries and intersections between the arts and sciences, that used both Staying With the Trouble (Haraway 2016) and written sources provided by each student in the WGS-3501-002 class Fall/ 2019 The final version comprises of a PDF file containing a honeycomb with word networks[1] inside each hexagon. Peripheral networks represent students’ individual written sources, and the central ones are the combination of all student frameworks (top) and Staying With the Trouble (Haraway 2016), our main collective theoretical guide (bottom).Some artistic choices were made because of their symbolic significance, like the use of a honeycomb to comprise our networks; others were a result of methodology itself; like the size for the pathways created (refer to project notes).
Using hexagons was a way of connecting to the “trouble” which we focused on: the bee population decline – due to pesticide use, pathogens, pests, and human hive management (Smith et al. 2013). They are all interconnected, despite their independence, and communicating they form, through a sympoetic process (p.58-60) (Haraway 2016), something new: the central image of written materials we used. After several runs of the material through the analysis software, I realized using only the strongest relationships between words meant not showing all words involved, and thus a much smaller network. Despite the significance of visualizing the strongest connections within a network, I chose to make the whole of the networks available. For the technique, this meant enlarging the resulting images’ file sizes. With this, there was an interesting outcome: having to actually zoom in the maps to get an idea of which words are there, inviting us to take a closer look.”
[1] With the purpose of focusing on the ideas and authors’ intents, only the sections containing these materials were analyzed (bibliography, page numbers and acknowledgements on these works were excluded).
Living in the Collapse – Jase Falk
“Living in the Collapse” is an attempt at learning with and through relations to physical space. The images and videos taken by Dallas Cant of Jase Falk’s performative process of installing fragments of poetry engages the forgotten ecology of the University of Winnipeg’s gender-neutral bathroom which is a neglected space within the institution. Perhaps because of this very neglect, the gender-neutral washroom was a space of refuge from the surveillance of the neoliberal university for Jase. The act of passing into a bathroom marked as ‘gender neutral’ is far from a neutral act as the name suggests radical inclusivity yet seems to result in a new shift between binary and non-binary, marking those who enter the washroom as ‘other.’ These documentations of Jase inside the washroom are a way to think about trans (in)visibilities and how gender transgressive acts are often reinterpreted back into binary frameworks, a move that Sarah Ahmed calls “straitening devices.” While sanctuary may be found in neglected spaces, this sanctuary is always ephemeral. This performance installation reflects the ephemeral nature of trying to escape the cis-hetero gaze and gestures towards an artistic methodology for exploring the possibilities for creation within collapsing spaces, life within decay, and finding moments of freedom within inhibiting institutions.