SPRING 2025, Mondays, 5:30-8:30PM; MEETs AT MIT

This course will introduce you to the rich history of ecofeminist theory and practice. We will examine the diversity of its socio-political contexts, implications, and impact, and interrogate its interconnections through a number of shorter influential texts, and zoom in on three books by renowned feminist climate activists: the Jewish-Indigenous-American activist Winona LaDuke’s To Be A Water Protector (2020), Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson’s All We Can Save (2020), and the German “Fridays for Future” co-founder Luisa Neubauer and Alexander Repenning’s Beginning to End the Climate Crisis. A History of Our Future (2019, 2023).

From local activism to regional and national fights against militarization and deforestation to broader movement organizing, education, and international politics, this class aims to showcase how ecofeminists nurture and grow resilience in times of multiple crises through employing “a radical political orientation grounded in solidarity, rather than sameness, as an organizing principle” (Christina Holmes).

Faculty

Sabine von Mering is Professor of German and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Director of the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and a member of the program faculty in Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. She received her Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of California Davis in 1998. Prior to that she studied Anglistik and Germanistik at the universities in Köln and Göttingen, Germany. She has written about antisemitism on social media, and right-wing radicalism. Currently she is examining Germany's responses to global climate change, and climate activism. Since the beginning of the pandemic she has hosted the popular "CGES Online Webinar" series.