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A History Of Ecofeminist-Socialist Resistance To Eco-Crisis In India, Gowri Parameswaran

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article traces the history of women’s environmental activism in India after independence. The earliest organizing efforts came from women from indigenous communities who wanted to collectively push back against government and private encroachments into communal lands. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, ecofeminism became a dominant paradigm to analyze and respond to environmental issues globally. Indian feminists adapted the model to analyzing ecological issues locally while also pushing back against its essentialism and its blindness to social and economic inequities. Indian eco(feminist) socialists demanded a centering of the voices of the most vulnerable communities in environmental movements. In …

Nickel Rush: Indigenous Testimonies And Predictions About Mining From New Caledonia And Québec, Hailey Dorner

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The rise of the electric vehicle industry will be accompanied with increased mining of two former French colonies, New Caledonia and Québec, both of which have historically been a great source of nickel despite Indigenous objection to nickel extraction. This thesis juxtaposes the novels of An Antane Kapesh, of Québec, and Claudine Jacques, of New Caledonia, to understand the Indigenous perspective of historical and future events of natural resource extraction and to see how these communities are impacted. Together they reveal that mining is a gendered act of violence that much like sexual assault, continues to have negative consequences long …

Systemic Assessment As A Tool For The Design Process, Juan De La Rosa

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces the idea of a systemic issue of misrepresentation of certain factors in the design process that could lead to ignoring the complexity and pos-sible impact of some design actions and artefacts in the system. By analyzing dif-ferent cases from literature, professional practice, and design research, a frame-work of initial analysis of the different factors that can assess some of the com-plexity of a project is presented, and a reflection is made regarding their signifi-cance and the elements they could evaluate from different cases.

Deep Listening: A Framework For Collaborative Climate Adaptation, Eric Gordon, Yihyun Lim, James Paradis, Tomas Guarna, Gabriela Degetau, Mona Vijaykumar

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article introduces Deep Listening, a novel transdisciplinary research agenda and framework for collaborative climate adaptation. It argues for the urgency to develop a communication approach in understanding how frontline communities interact with mediating institutions. Deep Listening is presented in five components: 1) knowledge sharing (mutually agreed upon protocols for data production and use); 2) holding space (co-creating spaces where institutional actors and communities can exchange, learn from each other and discuss); 3) the production and sharing of climate imaginaries (where local or Indigenous knowledge and community values are respected); 4) sensemaking with a diversity of perspectives and scientific data; …

Tree Box: Designing Embedded And Embodied Interaction For Contemplative Experiences In Nature-Rich Environments, Sónia Matos, Daniel Sousa

DRS Biennial Conference Series

We present Tree Box, an interactive artefact designed to connect users to nature-rich environments through contemplation. The object draws on recent debates that juxtapose the benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices with exposure to nature-rich environments. Combining both with embedded and embodied interaction, we hope to add to the growing importance of designing for human well-being and planetary health. Technically, Tree Box uses Bluetooth wireless technology to locate spots for contemplation in natural surroundings. The prototype also uses a vibrating motor and an accelerometer sensor to invite users to stop in each location. By drawing on the literature that informed …

Framing Scenario Thinking In A Mode Of Futures By Design Inquiry, Corbin Raymond, Andrew Morrison, Henry Mainsah

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In Transdisciplinary Design inquiry, the conceptual and ideational need to be clarified when relational and qualitative methodologies are enacted. This is crucial concerning complex, emergent, and urgent matters of climate change, sustainability, and collective citizenship. Theoretically, this paper covers conceptualizing scenarios as part of future-orientated envisioning and sits between design, anticipation, and foresight studies. We then propose three scenario thinking devices based on initial literature review and conceptual positioning to engage scenario thinking. The paper proposes a reframing of scenario thinking by design research as a means to inform clearer scenario building for long term sustainable collaborative futures. Methodologically, we …

Values Arising From Participatory Inclusive Design In A Complex Process, Stella Boess, Floris Jansen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper addresses inclusive design in a situation of complexity and how to improve it. The focus is on the inclusive design of a complex process and its tools, which is increasingly an issue in systemic design challenges. The current situation of climate change means we need to work on sustainability and inclusion at the same time. The paper presents a case study of an energetic renovation process and the stakeholders’ activities and views in it. In a research-through-design process, the paper traces the possibilities to intervene in the process with communication tools to increase inclusivity of both process and …

Towards Responsible Interaction Design Education, Alma Leora Culén, Amela Karahasanovic

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper addresses the need and opportunities to align courses in interaction design with ideas behind responsible research, design, and innovation by focusing on values, responsibility, and longer-term and more sustainable perspectives. Rather than discussing the design of new courses leveraging a specific perspective, e.g., sustainable interaction design, we suggest ongoing iterative transformations of an existing course aiming to include multiple relevant perspectives toward responsible education in interaction design. The course re-design utilizes research through design approach exploring how to position responsibility, values, and ontological perspectives when teaching interaction design, using educational components that we identified as a design material. …

Why Would I Ever Fry And Eat My Scoby? It Would Be Like Murder! Attuning To Nonhumans Through Kombucha Fermentation Practices, Aybars Senyildiz, Emilija Veselova

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Kombucha fermentation is a multispecies activity guided by human-microbe interactions. This study investigates kombucha fermentation practices as a platform to recognize relationality with nonhuman microbes. For this, relational theories enable reframing human-microbe relations by focusing on reciprocity and interconnectedness within multispecies relations. The empirical research consists of interviews, a design probing task, and a collective reflection workshop with kombucha brewers. The empirical research delivers insights into the agency of microbes, sensory experiences, and embodied knowledge in kombucha fermentation practices. Findings investigate how humans attune to the needs of microbes, and the role of embeddedness in ethical doings. In this way, …

Remaking The Social: Dialogical, Creative, And Co-Operative Capacities Of Thought At Hull House, Matthew Delsesto

DRS Biennial Conference Series

While social research is often positioned as a way to reflect social realities or de-velop theories for specialized fields through analyzing empirical evidence, based on data that is extracted from communities, Jane Addams points to a different mode of inquiry. This chapter introduces the theories and practices of the Hull House as an iterative and experimental process of inquiry— creating new knowledge in and through action, in a process of facing down pressing social chal-lenges. In particular it uses examples from the Hull House— which involved the design of the working people’s social science club, exhibitions on the industrial condition, …

Patricia Carpio Whiting: Women, Environmentalism, And The Oregon Legislature In The 1970s, Kim L. Andrews

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the life of one woman, Patricia Carpio Whiting, during the second half of the twentieth century, in an effort to expand the genre of women and environmental studies. It provides context for Carpio Whiting's accomplishments as an elected official in Oregon by describing her childhood in Chicago and her formative years in California, particularly how growing up Filipino American shaped her as an adult. As such, this thesis engages themes of gender, race, and class in historical scholarship. The thesis focuses on Carpio Whiting's life in Oregon and explores the opportunities and challenges facing women as they …

Technologies Of Territoriality: Indigeneity, Surveillance, And The State, Elspeth Iralu

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous cartography in the United States, India, and Palestine. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, I demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. I argue that Indigenous experiences of and responses to colonial and counterinsurgent surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and colonialism. …

Breaking | Grounding | Growing: Expanding The Rhode Island Gardening Reentry Programs As A Pathway Towards Stability, Juliana Soltys

Masters Theses

What happens to the over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails?

Changing in sentencing laws and policies have created a cycle of imprisonment, racially isolating and oppressing BIPOC communities. Reintegration and reentry programs are an avenue to break the cycle of recidivism. Through my work, I have developed hands-on, structured opportunities for justice-involved adults to rebuild a life for themselves by increasing the accessibility of gardening reentry programs. This project creates a space for mentorship and support for Rhode Island’s formerly incarcerated people with the goal of helping them to develop vital life skills through growing and …

The Great Delusion, Beth Johnston

Masters Theses

The climate crisis is a wicked problem that poses many obstacles for action and understanding. This thesis is a non-linear accumulation of academic essays, interpolated with lists, anecdotal observations, data, and artwork that together explore the entanglements and complications of the climate crisis and my journey in making artwork as a response to those complications. The thesis surveys six bodies of artwork created over the course of graduate school, which use photography, sculptural installation, performance, and video to illustrate various topics and methodologies. Grounded in research on environmental justice, this essay explores temporal disjunctures, climate data encounters, the decolonization of …

“An Eternity Or Two Later”: Family Of Choice In Elaine Castillo’S America Is Not The Heart, Caroliena E. Cabada

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Many of the challenges faced by environmental activists are issues of scale. How can vital changes be enacted and sustained over the necessarily long time scales of environmental restoration? Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018) illuminates a possible avenue for activists engaged in environmental justice work. Parts of the book contains extensive flashbacks to Hero’s, the protagonist’s, time as part of a cadre of the New People’s Army in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Though the NPA is not strictly an environmental activist group, the organization takes their cues from queer ecofeminist frameworks and the intersections between …

Teaching Activism: The Feminist Pedagogical Possibilities Of Why We Fly, Miranda M. Findlay

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Young adult fiction possesses the pedagogical power to educate young readers about activism, and more recently, authors of the genre have answered the call from young aspiring activists to deliver narratives that are reflective of and relevant to their own lives and communities. Published in October of 2021, the novel Why We Fly illustrates the complexities of participating in social justice activism while also providing entertaining and inspiring characters. In honor of Colin Kaepernick, authors Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal craft the fictional hero Cody Knight who encourages the text’s young protagonists to look at the world around them to …

Rethinking Italy’S Margins Through Walking: Mobility, Activism And Positionality In Wu Ming 2’S Il Sentiero Luminoso (2016) And Giuliano Santoro’S Su Due Piedi (2012), Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

The article argues that Wu Ming 2’s Il sentiero luminoso (2016) and Giuliano Santoro’s Su due piedi. Camminando per un mese attraverso la Calabria (2012) describe walking as an activity which allows one to recognize the social modifications of space, and to rethink the geographies of suburban areas in Italy. This analysis resounds with Robert P. Marzec’s invitation to study how literature has represented the privatization and the capitalist and neoliberal organization of space, revealing forms of internal colonization which epitomize a pillar of colonial ideology. Il sentiero luminoso and Su due piedi reconfigure walking as an epistemological, ecocritical …

Animal-Rights Primitivism: A Vital Needs Argument Against Modern Technology, James Robert Schultz

Between the Species

In this essay, I argue that those who embrace animal rights should also embrace primitivism—the view that humans should abandon modern technology and take up something like hunter-gatherer technology instead. I call my view “animal-rights primitivism” to distinguish it from human-centered arguments for primitivism. In particular, I employ a vital-needs framework to make my argument. I argue that hunter-gatherer technology is the least harmful kind of technology, it is sufficient to meet human vital needs, and it is possible for humans to make the transition to hunter-gatherer technology while still meeting their vital needs. Alternatively, I argue that even if …

Saving Salt City: Fighting Inequality Through Policy And Activism In Syracuse, Ny, 1955-1975, Scarlett Nicole Rebman

Dissertations - ALL

"Saving Salt City: Fighting Inequality through Policy and Activism in Syracuse, NY, 1955-1975" offers an in-depth exploration of civil rights and antipoverty struggles in the Salt City between 1955 and 1975. It centers the agency of activists who built interracial and cross-class organizations through which they contested the marginalization and segregation of Black Syracusans. By examining the struggles around major issues including education, housing, police brutality, employment, and a broader vision of economic justice, "Saving Salt City" documents the alternative visions and unrealized agendas for change generated by citizens in Northern urban spaces. This project recovers Syracuse's legacy as a …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Weatherford, They Dared to Dream: Florida Women Who Shaped History. by Thomas H. Appleton Jr.; Link, Brown, Ward, and Bone, eds., Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South. by Robert Cassanello; Kvach, De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South. by Frank J. Byrne; Pickenpaugh, Captives in Blue: The Civil War Prisons of the Confederacy. by David Carlson; Millner, The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet. by Katherine Marra; Bryan, Asylum Doctor: James Woods Babcock and the Red Plague of Pellagra. by Margaret Humphreys; Abreu, Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the …

Nature On A Leash: Tourism, Development, And The Environment On Amelia Island, Florida, Patrick H. Cosby

Florida Historical Quarterly

In the 2002 film, Sunshine State, writer and director John Sayles fictionalizes the recent history of Amelia Island, Florida. Sayles tells the tale of how unscrupulous developers attempted to acquire the most valuable beachfront properties from local African-American residents to build condominiums and golf courses, transforming Florida's weather and environment into a commodity to be sold to northern retirees and vacationers. Like the developers in Sunshine State, the Amelia Island Plantation sold dreams of "nature on a leash."1 Beginning in the early 1970s, the Amelia Island Plantation and its planners imposed a meticulously crafted, and prohibitively exclusive, version of living …

Book Reviews, Florida Historical Society

Florida Historical Quarterly

Carr, Digging Miami. by Ryan J. Wheeler; Marotti, Heaven's Soldiers: Free People of Color and the Spanish Legacy in Antebellum Rorida. by Patricia C. Griffin; Beeby, ed., Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures. by Evan P. Bennett; Brundage, ed., Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of Popular Culture, 1890-1930. by Valerie Babb; Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver. by Ellen Griffith Spears; Godfrey and Catton, River of Interest: Water Management in South Rorida and the Everglades, 1948-2010. by Chris Wilhelm; Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The …

Talking Trash: A Short History Of Solid Waste Management In Florida, Andrew Fairbanks

Florida Historical Quarterly

Death and taxes may be the only certainties in life, but taking out the trash is a daily routine for virtually every American household. Human beings have always discarded things, and in the more remote past, people often used discards for other purposes, such as empty oyster shells that formed impressive Native American ceremonial mounds. Until World War II, farmers and urbanites alike fed food scraps to pets, pigs, and other animals. Today, everything from worn out furniture to old cell phones is heaped into piles that comprise one of contemporary Florida's most easily identified landscape features: landfills. As a …

Antifascism And Wildness. “Partisan Ecologies” Between The Spanish Civil War And The Global Warming Era, Jaime Vindel

Artl@s Bulletin

This short essay uses the concept of “partisan ecologies” in order to analyse certain past and present chapters on the relationship between anti-fascism and nature. According to the Swedish eco- Marxist Andreas Malm, wilderness has not only represented an essentialist idea resulting from the projections of conservationist environmentalism about a supposedly untouched nature, but has also been one of the real spaces of a modern antagonism. Taking this theoretical point of departure, the text describes the Alpine Battalion of the Sierra del Guadarrama during the Spanish Civil War and its resonances in some contemporary events.

Day Of Solidarity: A Blog Post, Rae Peter

Feminist & Queer Praxis

Winona State University (WSU) Student Rae Peter shares their experiences organizing the April 11th "WSU Students for Palestinian Liberation hosted a Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people. This day of education was in celebration of World Keffiyeh Day, which falls on May 11th in 2022."

This blog post was intended for the WSU Academic Blog, which showcases the exciting and challenging work WSU students do.

Visions And Seeds Of Change : Pathways To Defining And Seeking Liberation, Ramon Kentrell Lee

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From July 2015 to May 2018, the sociopolitical terrain and atmosphere of Albany, New York underwent significant shifts as the levels and types of activism and liberation discourse increased. The shifts were related to national occurrences, such as the development of the Black Lives Matter movement, the state of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, the campaign and election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United State, and the emergence of the Me Too movement. During this period of change, activists engaged in a series of political struggles for situated identification and empowerment, the emergence of a …

Feminist Critiques Of Ecofascist, Nativist Appropriations Of Indigeneity Since 2016, Breana Lynch

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies M.A. Final Projects

This project explores recent manifestations of ecofascism within right-wing movements that deploy environmental concerns and rhetoric. Immigrants in the United States and in Europe and other global North countries have long been targeted by xenophobic policy and rhetoric guised as environmental protection. Although investigations by critical scholars including feminists on right-wing environmentalism unveiled the nativism and hate behind green agendas that are inherently anti-immigrant, I analyze recent ecofascist rhetoric and visual discourse for their harm to Indigenous communities, which is equally insidious, if less overt. This project engages with manifestos of extremists, right-wing political websites, and on-the-ground footage of alt-right …

The Usefulness Of Yoga Towards Interconnected Environmental Liberation, Gayatri Sehgal

Say Something Theological: The Student Journal of Theological Studies

There are a great number of interpretations of the term Yoga today, often being an elusive term. Yet we must recognize the importance of questioning which interpretation can provide us with a clear lens into its meaning, given the legacy of colonialism which has warped our understanding of it. Yoga has a great deal to offer us, and some of its imperative offerings for us today are its ethical principles, particularly the dissolution between the opposition of self and other. This paper employs the principles of nonviolence, non-stealing, and moderation from the yamas (external ethics) of Patanjali’s eight-fold path, as …

The Erasure Of Indigenous Populations Within National Geographic's Portrayal Of National Parks: A Digital Zine, Abigail Cook '22

Honor Scholar Theses

No abstract provided.

Slow Violence, Cli-Fi, And Opportunities For Change How Bipoc Futurisms Promote Activism, Francisco Baeza

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The threat of anthropogenic climate change is discussed almost exclusively in terms of “scientific” data to the exclusion of the humanities. For some worlds, climate change has already destroyed their ways of life and forced them to adapt. Climate fiction – or cli-fi – written by BIPOC authors is one way we can begin to think of how the planet is not just one world but a plurality of worlds. This project centers authors and world-makers who come from communities that have been left at the margins of the science fiction and cli-fi genres. By looking at fictions from a …