Workshop in Contemporary Feminist Political Ecology

Workshop date: 20 November 2025, 10am-6pm
The Institute for Czech Literature, Seminar room on the ground floor (dolní sál),Na Florenci 3, Prague 1

Organisers: Iwona Janicka (CETE-P) and Mateusz Chmurski (CEFRES)

Keynotes: Fatima Ouassak and Christina Kkona

Language: French

Political ecology treats the climate crisis as a fundamentally a political question. In recent years, its focus has shifted from questions around resource management to a more fundamental rethinking of the very bases of our societies. Specifically, contemporary French political ecology is particularly thought-provoking today because it turns to the question of living beings (le vivant)—animals, plants, soil, ecosystems—in order to understand the climate crisis and how to live with it. In that line of thought, climate change is posed as a crisis in our relations to living beings. In order to overcome it, we need to fundamentally change how we relate to non-human living and learn to inhabit the world together with them rather than only off them. The crucial political and philosophical question is how to live together in a world of radical differences. The workshop’s objective is to bring together several important francophone scholars in political ecology to Prague in order to discuss how we can rethink our collective habitability on Earth in the 21st century. In particular, the workshop focuses on feminist and queer approaches to rethinking ecology. The aim is not only to reconceptualize political ecology along the theoretical lines of the living (le vivant) but also to provide a dedicated space for a new generation of francophone scholars to share their ideas with scholars based in Central Europe and devise new ways of thinking about our contemporary ecological entanglements.

Programme

09.50 – 10.00 Welcome from the organisers (Iwona Janicka, Mateusz Chmurski)

10.00 – 11.00 Fatima Ouassak “Pirate-Thinking”

11.00 – 12.00 Christina Kkona “Queer Eco-Cosmopolitanism?”
 
12.00 – 13.30 Lunch (Café Tobruk)

13.30 – 15.00 Panel I: Terrestrial Bodies

Jeanne Etelain “Essay for a Theory of the Body-Zone”

Alžbeta Kuchtová “Borderlands of My Body, Borderlands of the Territory” 

Chiara Mengozzi “Echoes from the Earth: Hearing Devices, Listening Exercises”  

15.00 – 15.30 Coffee Break

15.30 – 17.00 Panel II: Affectivity and Labour

Cannelle Gignoux “Cannibalistic Dynamics and Sphere Theory in Nancy Fraser”

Cécile Rosat “Rethinking Environmental Responsibility as Relational and Affective”

Jan Bierhanzl “Uprootednedness (Simone Weil) and the Urban Fabric”

17.00 End

This event is funded by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (through the PARCECO scheme), and is a collaboration between CETE-P and the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES).