Department Seminar – Angeline Letourneau

“Manergy: Patriarchal underpinnings of fossil fuel dependence and resistance to transition.”

Angeline Letourneau, BA (she/her)

Project Assistant- Advancing Impact Assessment for Canada’s Socio-Ecological Systems

Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, Faculty of ALES

Abstract: A significant amount of scholarship has explored the multifarious ways in which gender intersects with the impacts of climate change, and our mitigation and adaptation. In this presentation, we turn attention toward the many ways gender also intersects with the fossil fuel industry—the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions and hence the focal point of societal responses to climate change. Those intersections, while often hidden from view, are the key to understanding the resistance of this industry to change, and to transformation. We explore the relationships between gender and the fossil fuel industry on the land that is now called Canada, however our analytical approach could also be applied to other extractive regions. Beginning with the colonial and patriarchal structures that paved the way for Canada’s resource-based economy, we use an ecofeminist and intersectional approach to create an intersectional analytical framework that centres environmental justice at its core. This framework will be used to examine how the legacies of extraction and colonial-patriarchy have defined fossil fuel development historically, and continue to do so into the 21st century, from the point of extraction to the point of consumption.

Please note: This session is currently planed as a Physical (in-person) event, but due to circumstances, may be presented on-line instead. This event will be updated accordingly.