Vortrag von Iwona Janicka: Ecofeminist Grand Narratives. Cohabitability with More-than-Human Worlds

28.04.2025|18:00 Uhr

Iwona Janicka: Ecofeminist Grand Narratives. Cohabitability with More-than-Human Worlds

Vortrag im Rahmen des Philosophischen Kolloquiums. 

Am 28.04.2025 um 18 Uhr. In Raum O.11.40.

Abstract: Much of today’s philosophical reflection on climate change happens through small-scale narratives, whether scientific, literary or artistic. Even though these are crucial, they often struggle with the bigger questions at stake: how to redraw our ontological maps to make the world more habitable for humans and nonhumans alike? How to enact collective political action to achieve a life-affirming future on our planet? This contribution makes two, somewhat provocative, claims: first, that we need to reclaim grand narratives for our ecological futures despite metanarratives’ bad reputation and, second, that ecofeminism has been tacitly attempting this gesture. This paper will sketch the key concepts and parameters of these new ecological grand narratives that ecofeminists have been proposing. It will demonstrate how ecofeminists allow us to rethink the position of a human being on the planet and to conceive a more-than-human co-habitability on a grander scale. The talk also contends that we need more ecofeminist, and more intersectionally diverse, grand narratives with which to re-imagine our collective destiny.

Iwona Janicka is Research Team Leader at the Centre for Enviromental and Technology Ethics - Prague (CETE-P) and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She works in twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy: enviromental philosophy, political philosophy and feminist philosophy, with a particular focus on the questions of social transformation. Her current book project examines how to rethink politics with nonhumans in the context of climate change. She is the author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism. Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).