scholarly journals The Weight of Trash: Teaching Sustainability and Ecofeminism by Asking Undergraduates to Carry Around Their Own Garbage

2015 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 30-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Breanne Fahs

This essay outlines a recent assignment I designed for an upper-division cross-listed women and gender studies/social justice and human rights course I teach called, “Trash, Freaks, and SCUM.”  In the context of the students reading Edward Humes’ (2012) Garbology, the trash bag assignment asked that students carry around their trash for two 48-hour periods and that they present it to the class.  While the first two day period assesses their actual trash output, students are asked to produce as little trash as possible for the second two day period. This assignment aims to make trash visible and to help students learn about climate change, sustainability, conspicuous consumption, and how their individual carbon footprint contributes to the “big picture” of environmental strain.  I describe this assignment and its goals in this essay, followed by an assessment of its role in teaching about social justice, in order to underscore the importance of experiential learning with trash and to highlight how this assignment fits the mission of my courses on feminism and social justice.

2021 ◽  
pp. 1035719X2110436
Author(s):  
Jeffery Adams ◽  
Stephen Neville

Evaluators are committed to practice that is high quality and conducted ethically. Despite this, gender and sexually diverse populations are not always adequately considered in evaluation practice. Ensuring fuller inclusion of gender and sexually diverse people is required to give effect to human rights obligations and to enable comparatively poorer wellbeing outcomes for these groups to be addressed. Based on our experience conducting evaluation (and research) with both general populations and gender and sexually diverse populations, we suggest a need to build inclusive practice among evaluators. To guide inclusive evaluation practice, we outline three domains for consideration – terminology and language, processes of research inclusion and implications of inclusion. These are not offered as a checklist but as a way to encourage reflexive practice among evaluators. Given evaluators are often concerned with promoting equity and social justice, we are hopeful that actions taken by evaluators can enhance the inclusion of gender and sexually diverse people in evaluation activities and contribute to better wellbeing outcomes for them.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Bunch

This article discusses women and gender, and first identifies the differences between the concepts. It moves on to a critical examination of the norms and their institutional manifestations, along with selected UN system efforts to promote women's rights in development, peace and security, human rights, and health. The article also provides a balanced evaluation of how much things have changed for girls and women over the last sixty years.


Author(s):  
Ayşe GÖNÜLLÜ ATAKAN

Today, the necessity of addressing development not only with its economic dimension but also with its social and environmental dimensions has been accepted by the international community. Alternative Women and Development approaches that emerged in the 1970s also emphasized that the idea of development without women would not be possible, and that the main development is possible with the empowerment of women as important actors of development. It is a dominant view that is agreed in the literature on women and gender studies that one of the most important tools for achieving empowerment, which is conceptualized as “gaining the ability of women to make strategic life choices”, is their participation in decision-making mechanisms. In this context, it is vital for women to participate in formal politics with their own perspective in order to solve their own problems based on their own gendered experiences. In this study, inadequate political representation of women in Turkey, as a candidate to be among the developed countries, is discussed from a gender perspective in terms of reasons, results and solutions. Keywords: Political participation, gender, women and development, empowerment.


2020 ◽  
pp. 194084472093904
Author(s):  
Leslie Rebecca Bloom ◽  
Bonnie Breyer ◽  
Chrissy Hoffman ◽  
Jocelyn Izaguirre-Zavala ◽  
Walter Jones ◽  
...  

This article presents the script of Our Actions, Our Stories: A Readers Theater that was researched, written, and presented by students in a women’s and gender studies (WGS) class called “Action: Intersections and Coalitions.” Based on qualitative interviews, the script illustrates six respondents’ perspectives on their activism and explores their backgrounds and intersectional identities in relation to these. The readers theater explores how activism and identity intersect and what that means for those engaged in activism. The article concludes with a discussion about the meanings that doing this project in a feminist experiential learning course had for the WGS students involved and how such experiences contribute to growing a much-needed new generation of qualitative researchers dedicated to social justice.


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