Upcoming Events
In this talk, based on extensive ethnographic research in Italy, Dr. Parmigiani will focus on representations of women and gender-based violence in contemporary Italy. She will describe and analyze the politics of representation enacted by the Italian feminists of UDI (Unione delle Donne in Italia), the oldest Italian feminist group, in the context of the pervasive representations of women as victims portrayed by the Italian media, Catholic pro-life movements, and hegemonic patriarchal discourses. By analyzing UDI's motto “'We are witnesses, not victims," she will address the strengths and weaknesses of the "ethos of survivorship" and suggest other possible empowering ways to reframe discourses and representations around women and violence, in Italy and elsewhere.
IRCPL’s Religion and Climate series is animated by calls to reimagine human relationships with and responsibilities to the environment in an age of planetary crisis. As the impact of climate change is increasingly but unevenly felt, religion is emerging as a site of epistemological doubt, struggle, and possibility. This series explores the cosmological underpinnings that shape diverse understandings of the environment and examine how religious subjects react to and act upon the ecological upheavals they face, challenging exclusively technocratic and secular responses to the climate crisis.
The series involves four events structured around the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, and Air—each of which will take one element as a lens for engaging with specific climate struggles and the religious debates they ignite. In the final event, an online program on the theme of “Air,” Sophie Chao (University of Sydney) and Nikita Simpson (SOAS, University of London) will discuss their work on climate change, atmospherics and spirits in West Papua and India. This conversation will explore both the religious dimensions of air and atmospheres in these contexts, and the ways contemporary climate change emerges out of longer histories of environmental destruction.
