WHO WE ARE
FERN is a research collective that supports feminist-oriented and gender-based approaches to environmental challenges while creatively and critically envisioning sustainable futures and promoting just relations between all living things.
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WHAT WE DO
Growing Community
Growing Community | As an emergent and rhizomatic community, FERN is the connective tissue for a body of scholarship that investigates environmental issues from a gendered lens. This community of practice, virtually and in person, seeks to reach from the academy into community respectfully and reciprocally, while centering care and refusing extractive relations.
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Cultivating Collaboration
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Cultivating Collaboration I As a transdisciplinary collective, FERN engages ideas within the academy and beyond, including activist, artistic, and policy researchers from diverse backgrounds and life-experiences to address pressing environmental challenges. This approach celebrates collaboration to address environmental injustices through multiple methods and angles of vision.
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Critique and Creativity
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Critique and Creativity | From an imaginative lens, FERN expresses hope for future generations. We are committed to a shared vision that engages creative methods and media to envision sustainable, decolonial futures. FERN is dedicated to supporting research, art, activism, and open dialogue about socio-environmental relations with special attention to interconnected injustices, the lived realities of climate change, and oppressive systems of power (racism, sexism, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism).
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Envisioning Futures
Short-term | FERN will act as a hub to connect scholars, activists, and any interested folks in finding relevant resources, including books, articles, and creative works. FERN will also work to provide a platform for communication and organization amongst participants to find collaborations, and to organize writing, artistic, and activist projects, informed by critical ecofeminism.
Medium-term | FERN will produce alternative and academic media and outputs, such as zines, magazines, blog posts and an ecofeminist-inspired journal that includes scholarly research, narrative and creative essays, as well as artistic entries.
Long-term | FERN will grow into an annual conference or organizing meeting to share research, activist work, and to discuss together how FERN can cultivate and generate environmental and social justice in the academy and beyond. This could include an annual writers’ workshop and retreat, and writing and activism school.