Composting (in) the gender studies classroom: Growing feminisms for climate changing pedagogies

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on our experience co-teaching an undergraduate unit called “Gender and Environment,” we argue for an expansive feminist approach to teaching climate change that embodies the content of the unit in its classroom practice. This requires: (a) understanding the classroom not as separate from the phenomenon of climate change but as one of its sites, striated by the diverse bodies, histories, and other materialities that comprise it; (b) a rigorous understanding of climate change as a feminist issue, inseparable from crises of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchal power, and violent body normativities; and (c) a commitment to responsive and accountable pedagogies. Here, the feminist environmental humanities concept and method of “composting” (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018) helps describe how environmental matters can be mulched together with key social justice concepts and insights in order to nourish new possibilities for climate change pedagogies. Composting thus becomes a metaphoric guide for how we configure the work of teaching climate change—not as masterful dissemination of privileged knowledge but as a co-worlded pedagogy that learns from intersectional, anticolonial, queer, and crip perspectives. This pedagogy thus also contributes to growing more accountable and responsive feminisms within and beyond the classroom. The first half of this article explores how an understanding of both climate change and composting manifest in the context of our co-taught unit. In the second half, we offer a scrapbook—produced with care and joy but necessarily condensed and incomplete—that exemplifies some of the ways that we put this framing into practice.