October 15th, 2020
Plenary Lecture
Dr. Ambika Kamath, University of California Berkeley
12:15-1:30 PM EST
A Dialectical Future for Behavioral and Evolutionary Ecology
In this talk, Dr. Kamath will describe a recent expansion in their thinking about the conceptual underpinnings of how we behavioral and evolutionary ecologists study adaptation and natural selection. Specifically, they argue that deep conceptual progress in our fields hinges, in part, on making explicit the implicit political perspectives underlying our research. In this manner, we can make room for an understanding of nature that is rooted in a multitude of explicitly acknowledged political perspectives. Their argument weaves dialectical thinking as applied to evolutionary biology, philosophical considerations of agency, and feminist standpoint theories together with their lived experience as a practicing scientist, union worker, and person trying to make meaning in our challenging world.
Workshop
Sammantha Holder and Christina Crespo, University of Georgia
1:50-3:05 PM EST
That's What She Said: Building Networks of Support, Collaboration, and Friendship
Part story time, part workshop about creating workshops, and part reflection and discussion--this session explores how friendship and collaboration can become tools for not only combatting the isolating forces of academic research, but also for working towards change. We center collaboration as a means of troubling the boundaries between fieldwork, research, and teaching. We began organizing the events that would become Gender, the Body, and Fieldwork Across Disciplines with the goal of creating space for crucial conversations around fieldwork considerations that are not always openly discussed, often because they are deemed irrelevant or too uncomfortable for academic spaces. In this workshop, we will share stories to offer insights that we have gained through the process of working together. Through reflective activities and breakout discussions, participants will explore what collaborations means, reflect on what we as individuals bring to the table, and identify opportunities for strategically forming networks of support.
October 16th, 2020
Rachel Arney and Akanksha Sharma, University of Georgia
10:00-11:30 AM EST
“It is not simply that social factors such as gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and ability shape
our capacities and styles of movement in relation to other people, but rather that our capacities
for movement shape our bodily experiences and identities within normative social orders and
hegemonic mobility regimes.” Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age
of Extremes, pg. 45
This session seeks to create dialogue about what it may mean to have a body that is disabled, a
body that is transforming in unanticipated ways, a body we may not understand anymore, a
body that may be frustratingly uncooperative, especially in traditional field settings and routines.
Rachel and Akanksha hope to explore the challenges faced in academia with differing bodies and how the academy can become a more accessible and transformative place to different abilities and mobilites. Through discussions on the psychological, intellectual, and physical impact of bodily limitations, they hope to create dialogue that removes stigma experienced while conducting fieldwork in a patriarchal, hegemonic landscape.
This interactive session will be an open and honest dialogue about past experiences, apprehensions, diagnostic journeys, and working in the field with bodies that may not cooperate in the ways we wish they did. We will also grapple with understanding autoimmunity and the realities it engages with fieldwork, and strategies for making the field specifically, and academia in general, ‘work’ for our unacknowledged, unaccustomed bodies. The session will also engage with intersectionality and positionality to examine how diverse people facing bodily limitations experience fieldwork in an often inequitable academy. Rachel and Akanksha hope to create a community for scholars who move through life in an unaccustomed way. They ask participants to come prepared to share and engage in deep conversation and activities with the goal of creating a rough outline of what fieldwork can look like moving forward.