Graduate seminar: Ecofeminism and its Companions: Investigative Heuristics and the Gaze of the Researcher

Instructors: Katharine N. Farrell ICTA (UAB) 2013 ¿ PhD Seminar Political ecology is simultaneously a scholarly and an activist project, where the politics of knowledge production and the role of politics in shaping the ecologies of the planet is made visible and spoken. A consequence of this complex identity, as a field of enquiry and a space of political performance, is that the political ecology research is confronted with the challenge of considering not only the technical but also the political implications of the methods and analytics that they choose to use to conduct their research. Making this scholarly/political¡ choice visible is one of the performative objectives of ecofeminism. Using the practice and principles of ecofeminism as an entry point, this seminar will present students with basic descriptions of a selection of approaches to political ecology research/activism, and will provide a discursive space for exploring both the technical and the ethico-political implications of the researcher's choices about how they fix their gaze on the study objects and performative political spaces of their research. The main learning objective is that students gain the ability to critically assess both the technical and the political implications of the analytical frames and empirical methods that they choose to use in their research.