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Program Description
Program Update
Participating Faculty and Students
Resources Available for Fellows and Researchers
Program Description
The contemporary search for ecological wisdom continues to seek a covenant that is inclusive of all peoples and species of the earth. This search has illuminated the gendered dimensions of our global environmental predicament, and raised questions about the meaning of indigeneity and ties to place in an increasingly globalized world. The search has also drawn on, as well as challenged, key elements of Western science and environmental management.
Ecological Conversations: Gender, Science and the Sacred proposes to foster a spirited dialogue across global and disciplinary borders, inviting fellows to participate in a forum for critical reflection and scholarly interchange on the fundamental philosophical, evolutionary, political, and spiritual questions raised by the convergence of women’s and environmental movements. Our goal is to host a series of dynamic conversations where scholars, writers, scientists, theologians and grass-roots activists from different cultural and national contexts can move beyond environmental crisis rhetoric and explore conceptual and ethical vocabularies that meet the challenges of a new millennium.
Each year’s theme will balance questions of theory and practice. In addition to pursuing their own research project, fellows will give one public lecture during their residency and participate in a bi-monthly seminar with university faculty and graduate students.
First Year: Fellowships for the 1999-2000 academic year were awarded to individuals from India, Israel, Zimbabwe, Canada and the United States. The first-year theme of gender and ecology was addressed from the multiple perspectives of environmental justice poetics, ecofeminist theory, agricultural biology, sociology and Jewish mysticism. Detailed descriptions of the first-year fellows and their research projects can be found here.
Second Year: In 2000-2001 the program addressed issues of scientific practice. Themes for discussion included: the history and contemporary understanding of evolutionary theory and natural history; how scientific concepts and research are translated into public environmental discourse; ecofeminist visions of science and technology; new approaches to issues of reproduction and population, the history and practice of indigenous sciences; and studies of new scientific paradigms. Fellowships were awarded to individuals from Australia, Bolivia, Germany and the United States, with research interests spanning environmental journalism, microbial ecology, community science, environmental justice and feminist geography. Detailed descriptions of the second-year fellows and their proposed research projects can be found here.
Third Year: The program theme for the third and final year, 2001-2002, addresses the integration of scientific and sacred epistemologies in investigations of ecology, cosmology, health and healing. We will also discuss alternative conceptions of relationships to place, land, and other living beings. Fellowships were awarded to individuals from Australia, the Philippines, and the United States. Research foci include indigenous healers in the third world, environmental activist nuns in North America, an exploration within western culture toward recovering an authentic sense of the sacred, Native American Blackfoot cosmology, and locating the sacred within ecofeminist science fiction. Detailed descriptions of the third-year fellows and their proposed research projects can be found elsewhere on this site.
During the past two years, several University of Oregon faculty and graduate students have joined our resident fellows in conversation via an on-going program seminar, a public lecture series, and CSWS- sponsored retreats and conferences. As a group, we have examined how dominant scientific and political paradigms about the environment are limited by an overly-human centered view of nature and bio-diversity, the presumption of scarcity, an essentially capitalist economic framework, and a failure to appreciate the knowledge and ecological practices of women, indigenous peoples, and religious/spiritual communities.
The Rockefeller Foundation has generously provided funding for all fifteen of our Ecological Conversations fellows to return to the University of Oregon for a program finale in May 2002. This event will allow the fellows from different years to meet one another, as well as to offer the public and the greater university community a chance to hear some of the culminating ideas from the three-year dialogue. Evening panel discussions will be open to the public, and the entire week-long series of dialogue sessions will be recorded and transcribed the for publication.
This final gathering of fellows will focus our collective insight toward a dialogue of re-imagining. Even as we critique current environmental discourses for their limitations and exclusionary practices, we will imagine paradigms and power structures that are inclusive of all life forms; that take diverse spiritual beliefs and traditional ecological practices seriously as ways of knowing; and that aim to nourish more just and sustainable relationships between humans and other forms of life, men and women, those who currently over-consume the earth's resources and those whose basic needs for food, shelter, health, safety and dignity are unmet. We will pivot the focal point among the triad of terms that have guided our three-year conversation: gender, science and the sacred – as we work to build a provocative vision connecting ecological sustainability and social justice.
