On November 7th at the Environmental Humanities Forum, Jennifer Hamilton will present a paper on the ecological concept of resilience, titled “Reclaiming Resilience for an Ecofeminist Urbanism”.

Jennifer has been a Seed Box Postdoctoral Fellow since 2016. She is currently housed by consortium partners at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University, where she works between interdisciplinary feminist environmental humanities and literary studies. Her first monograph, This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear – an ecocritical study that explores our ideological relationship with stormy weather across time – came out this August. At the moment she is collaborating with Astrida Neimanis on a project titled “Composting: Feminisms and Environmental Humanities”.

The aim of the paper is to build a material and affective critique of resilience and reconstruct the term for use in feminist environmental humanities. Despite arguing that its hegemonic figurations need to be critiqued, the paper nevertheless aims to demonstrate that resilience is also a very useful concept. As Jennifer argues, “[…] being resilient in times of environmental crisis, and of occupying resilience discourses, focus on embodying resistance to dominant ways of being” – the material resilience theorized in this paper is akin to such figurations.

For more information about the seminar, please contact Daniel Andersson: daniel.j.andersson@liu.se