WEGO
WEGO is an innovative research and training network with the purpose to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary social-environmental scientists on feminist political ecology in Europe. The network will look in detail at local communities’ coping strategies to build resilient, equitable and sustainable futures and how they link to global sustainable development policies. WEGO will research diverse economic and ecological practices that create new forms of gender relations, livelihoods and care activities, in response to growing lack of resilience of the economy and ecosystem. Through co-supervision by academics and non-academic partners, WEGO-ITN PhDs will engage in critical, practical, and creative exploration of the contribution and relationships between their individual doctoral study projects across the three interconnecting research themes: 1. Climate Change, Economic Development and Extractivism; 2. Commoning, Community Economies and the Politics of Care; and 3. Nature/Culture/ Embodiment and Technologies. The network is funded by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 program.
The two topics located at the Division Gender and Globalization are:
Social (re)production and the good life in a post – growth society: a feminist and queer perspective
Within this project social justice movements specifically degrowth experiments in the USA and Europe will be mapped out with a special focus on changing gender roles, the reorganization of labour and new consumption patterns as well as their contribution to alternative models of well-being. In addition, the project will investigate the connections between the degrowth movement and the emancipatory projects of feminism and gender/queer movements. A central feature of the research will be to investigate alliances among feminism and queer movements with degrowth movements in their collective search for alternative models of well – being and of a ‘good life’.
Liquid encounters – fluid conversations around water, environment, and gendered naturecultures
This project will explore the natureculture of water from a FPE lens. Working in different landscapes, the ESR will set out how to understand water not only in terms of a growing scarce commodity but also in terms of the material entanglements of a gendered bodily existence. Questions will be asked, for example, about the consequences of polluted water on gendered bodies. The study will take an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together an economic, an ecological, a technological and a political science perspective. These four approaches will be brought together in a comparative study of the governance of water looking at the interconnections among communities, gender and water in urban environments in Germany, the Netherlands and Uruguay. The study will present an understanding of the naturecultures of water sketching the different layers of political intervention in infrastructural planning and spatial development in Europe, learning from the example of Uruguay. This will build awareness of the complicated entanglements of social, cultural and economic factors influencing the governance of water.