Shift and Signal School

An Intersectional Analysis of Geoengineering: Overlapping Oppressions and the Demand for Ecological Citizenship

Thursday 17 May, 11am – 12pm
Green Room, Ampersand Inventions, 4th Floor, Commercial Union House, 39 Pilgrim Street, Newcastle, NE1 6QE

FREE | Please book here

In this talk, Dr. Tina Sikka of Newcastle University examines geoengineering science and technologies through an intersectional lens that considers gender, racialization, and class.

Intersectionality, in this context, can be understood as the “interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power”. Sikka takes up each of these in kind while attending, throughout, to the need to consider how geoengineering, as a form of scientific theory and technological practice, must contend with overlapping forms of oppression and power that will inevitably shape its potential deployment, effects, and the regimes regulating its use.

She will finish with a case study outlining why this kind of research is crucial and how it might work in practice using stratospheric aerosols, precipitation, and South Asian women as an example.

This talk is part of the Shift and Signal School, three days of workshops, sharing, live recordings and celebration of our commitment to work together for a flourishing future.

Shift and Signal is a commission by Dr Alex Lockwood, that creates a space in which to imagine how we can go deeper in our adaptations to the crises of the contemporary moment such as social inequality, climate change, and species extinction. The project is an attempt to shift us beyond the usual stuck conversations about how we implement change, and signal towards better ways of living that are now appearing.

The Shift and Signal School is part of Deep Adaptation. An ongoing programme of commissions, talks, events and workshops looking at how current social, civic and economic issues can be understood in relation to climate change.