Ithaca College

Submitted on behalf of the Office of Energy Management & Sustainability

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4TH 6 - 8 PM, CLARK LOUNGE: Join University of Southern California lecturer Jennifer Bernstein to discuss her recent article On Mother Earth and Earth Mothers: Environmentalism's Gender Problem

ABSTRACT: At a moment in history when increasing numbers of women have liberated themselves from many of the demands of unpaid domestic labor, prominent environmental thinkers are advocating a return to the very domestic labor that stubbornly remains the domain of women. This is consistent with the longstanding characterization of the kitchen, garden, and farm as a pre-modern oasis disconnected from the forces of technology and industrialization. In both the developed and developing world, women are expected to eschew time-saving technological solutions and wage-based labor in favor of actions that prioritize the environment at the expense of their own objectives. This raises the question — what would an environmentalism that takes feminism seriously look like? To start, it will need to come to terms with modernization. Feminists have long advocated for those fruits of modernization — individuation, privacy, education, and civil rights — that have enabled the relative gender equality that the majority of the developed world experiences today. In the developing world, it is also modernization, and in particular the transition from agrarian to urban livelihoods, that has the most potential to transform women’s realities. In short, modern notions of rights, identity, and agency cannot be reconciled with premodern social, economic, and political arrangements. Female empowerment, in the long term, requires modern agriculture, energy, and infrastructure. Environmental ethics that reject those prerequisites in the name of the natural and pastoral are, simply put, irreconcilable with feminism.

DR. JENNIFER BERNSTEIN is a lecturer at the Dornsife Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. She completed her PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she worked on developing quantitative metrics to assess contemporary environmental worldviews. While working towards her PhD, she was employed by UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara City College, and Hawaii Pacific University, where she developed and taught geography courses both face-to-face and online. Previously, she was employed by the political strategy firm American Environics, where she served as Senior Data Analyst. She also holds a Masters in Geography from UC Santa Barbara and a Masters in Science Education from Montana State Bozeman. Her research interests include American Environmentalism, Western American Environmental History, Distance Teaching and Learning, and California geography.

Wednesday, October 5th 6 - 8 pm - Clark Lounge

SPONSORED BY The Office of Energy Management & Sustainability and Women's and Gender Studies

Free and open to the public - Refreshments served from 6 - 7 pm in Klingenstein Lounge

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Rebecca Evans at revans1@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3763. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.