On this year’s International Women’s Day, I took part in a trial of a participatory workshop that aimed to develop critical thinking skills for understanding the intersectionality of climate, environment and race.
Natalie Lartey and her team at Wood & Water led us to think about how colonial histories, lived experience, identities and power structures shape one’s relationship with climate change.
The workshop was split into three parts. The first part involved going around the room, exploring selected visual images and tangible objects. There are also QR codes that link to webpages, explaining what the objects are, such as Stethoscope, Air Quality Diffusion Tube, Water Purification Tablets, Pineapple. Then, we discussed our memories of and experiences with these items and the systems that produced them.
The second part involved a deep-topography / psycho-geography walk around two bordering neighbourhoods in London that have distinctively different demographies. As we walked around, we noticed different landscapes, skylines and street scenes. Participants were invited to make visual images as they went along, evidencing the observations. On the walk, we were informed of some statistics such as air pollution, life expectancies, etc. This affective approach allowed us to focus on marginalised populations in the neighbourhoods.
The last part of the workshop involved creative production of a cultural product that reflects our thoughts and observations of the topics. I had an idea of making a short animation or a comic strip that challenges and deconstructs people’s obsessions with perfect fruits and vegetables when shopping at supermarkets in order to cut food waste.
‘An intersectional analysis of climate change illuminates how different individuals and groups relate differently to climate change, due to their situatedness in power structures based on context-specific and dynamic social categorisations. (Anna Kaijser & Annica Kronsell, 2014).
In the wake of the call for extending the critical lens of intersectionality to the field of climate justice (Mikulewicz et al. 2023), we need innovative and renewed theoretical and methodological frameworks to connect intersectionality and climate change studies. I think Wood & Water‘s approach has helped ground this challenge and develop a personalised critical thinking path that’s empowering.
It’s just a beginning, but it looks promising.