Feminist Pathways Symposium: Confronting the Climate Crisis

This symposium aims to call attention not only to the climate crisis, but also to what is at stake in the kinds of responses to it that are proposed. Many of the proposed “fixes” are rooted in the same political economic paradigms and worldviews that created the current climate and ecological crises in the first place; they often not only pose great environmental risks themselves, but also threaten to gravely deepen existing gender, racial and global inequalities. However, there are also encouraging signs that many activists and researchers are approaching climate breakdown with a global justice perspective. Our goal is to highlight, among them, the critically important work being done by diverse feminist thinkers, from feminist political economists and ecologists to indigenous and racial justice activists, who outline the sorts of radical solutions that the crisis demands, proposing fundamental shifts in the dominant global economic model. Throughout, we explore how intersectional feminist analysis, with an emphasis on global justice, can lead to the fundamental transformations urgently needed to forestall climate catastrophe.