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Abstract:
In the context of climate change, large infrastructure adaptation projects fortify against increasingly bad weather to protect the status quo. If infrastructure is a substrate for life and sociality that suggests what is possible, we argue that a transformative feminist response to climate change demands different kinds of infrastructure: infrastructures that support other collective, social, material, and multispecies ways of being in common. Feminist infrastructure for better weathering is a proposal and a practice that emerges from seven years of collaboration across various projects. As The Weathering Collective (which also includes artist Tessa Zettel), we experiment in building and maintaining alternative climate change infrastructures. Collectively, in passing, and unspectacularly, these help us practice supported vulnerability and negotiated shelter across difference, and create possibilities for non-transactional curiosity and care.
Bio:
Astrida Neimanis is Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities, and Director of the FEELed Lab at UBC Okanagan (Kelowna, Canada);
Jennifer Mae Hamilton is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at UNE (Armidale, Australia) and founder of CoWS (The Community Weathering Station). Since 2015, Jennifer and Astrida have been been experimenting, researching, writing, and making together: as co-coordinators of COMPOSTING Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities; as co-convenors of Hacking the Anthropocene 2016-2018, and (with Tessa Zettel) as founding members of The Weathering Collective. Their most recent co-authored publication is “Feminist Infrastructures for Better Weathering” (Australian Feminist Studies, 2021).
