Life Sciences Commons^™

A Troop, A Raft, A Bed, Hanna Jane Guendel

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A Troop, a Raft, a Bed tells the interwoven fictional stories of three major animals (the mountain gorilla, the Adélie penguin, and the American eel) and four transitional animals (the white stork, the humpback whale, the common octopus, and the great white shark). The stories are told from the animals' perspectives, and are written with language that considers each animal's unique intelligence, mind, and behavior. These stories seek to communicate how animals around the world may be experiencing the various effects of climate change and global warming.

What If The Key To Climate Change Is Hiding Under The Sea?, Shira Feder

Capstones

“We know more about outer space than we do the ocean,” says Vicki Ferrini, a research scientist at Columbia University with over 20 ocean expeditions under her belt. And as the woman leading Seabed 2030, the charge to map the world’s oceans—which are 85% unexplored—she knows how vital this is to combat climate change and exactly how she’s going to do it. Read it here: https://medium.com/@shira.feder/what-if-the-key-to-climate-change-is-hiding-under-the-sea-4503565c33a2

Nature's Queer Negativity: Between Barad And Deleuze, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their two views, but to draw out the consequences of their entanglement. Insofar as Barad’s work conceptualizes life (and art) as a vitalizing encounter, it cannot, this essay argues, account for the queer negativity at play in environmental politics, including the politics of climate change.

Reimagining Movements: Towards A Queer Ecology And Trans/Black Feminism, Gabriel Benavente

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples.

In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but …