Welcome to the Climate Justice Field School (CJFS) learning out loud space. This is where CJFS collaborators reflect on what we’ve been doing and learning in our field school. Thanks for joining us on our journey, and if you have any thoughts on what you’re reading we’d be happy to hear from you.
–
Matriarchal Strategies and Outdoor Field Work
Wandering into a busy kitchen where a big meal is being prepared, I am given a snack and a job to do. I listen and join in the conversation and laughter, am casually shown what needs to be done, and gently instructed as my novice hands try and learn what to do. The kitchen is warm and the smell of food fills the air, and I am free to stay or go. Later when it’s time to eat, the holubtsi I made are lumpy and unraveling, but they taste just as good. I know my hands will remember a little better next time, and that I’m helping to make something more than rolled up cabbage.
The settings in which we gather to learn and build relationships matter.
Context gives our bodies and minds a rich set of cues about social dynamics, tells us how attentive we can be to physical or emotional needs, and provides a whole range of sensory stimuli. In our approach to hosting the Climate Justice Field School, we set out to be intentional and experimental with the context as a strategy to interrupt ingrained power dynamics. “Kitchen talk,” characterized to me by Connie Watts (1), is a high-context, informal and matriarchal way of sharing knowledge, surrounded by a set of conditions that contrast quite starkly with the austerity and professionalism of the workplace environments that so many of us in the field school have become accustomed to. We are curious about how contextual professionalism props up status-quo power dynamics, and whether taking the group out of those settings will help things to shift.
In asking how we can experiment with matriarchal approaches to the pedagogy of the Climate Justice Field School, I have been circling back to Connie’s descriptions of kitchen talk; to Sadira Rodrigues and Reyhan Yazdani’s contributions to a roundtable discussion called Matriarchal Strategies in Design (2021); and to Aaron Nelson-Moody and Justin Wilson’s Looking Back to the Potlatch as a Guide to Truth, Reconciliation and Transformative Learning (2019). These are some of the contextual conditions we’ve been experimenting with in order to help nurture a matriarchal approach:
Soft Edges: There is a porosity to the way we can join in or step back; we are attempted to collaborate in ways where no one feels pushed to do something they’re not ready for or obliged to stay longer than they want to. This consensual opting in or out is implicit, and contrasts with the expectations of transactional ways of working.
Sharing Food: Making sure everyone is fed means that no one is quietly fighting pangs of hunger while trying to focus on the intellectual task of learning. Food rearranges people, gives us something in common to experience and nourishes our body-minds.
Distributed Leadership: Everyone is given an opportunity to be a novice and to be an expert. Everyone is there to contribute, but no one feels pressure to know all the answers or get it right every time. There’s room for contributions to emerge when the agenda isn’t jam-packed with one person’s plans.
Informality: We’ve been noticing what parts of our stories can show up when we don’t lead with our job titles or qualifications. Letting humour, humanity and humility come into the way we gather is a strong determinant for relationship building, and something we can nurture through the ways we introduce ourselves, the pace and settings for our gatherings.
Setting as Teacher: Meeting outdoors in the company of earth relatives (plant and animal beings), with exposure to the weather — heat, smells, fresh air, smoke, sounds — means we are collectively experiencing the conditions of climate. These embodied and shared feelings of grief/discomfort and gratitude/ease catalyze a different form of memory and set of reminders that we are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
In navigating how we host the field school, we have often returned to a desire to centre joy within the complexities and challenges of climate justice learning. Matriarchal strategies open the space for tenderness and patience to interrupt patterns of hierarchical expertise, urgency and progress-is-bigger that members of the field school have identified as challenges in climate and equity work. So, let’s roll up our sleeves, share stories, and make things together.
1 — Connie Watts is my friend, mentor and long-time collaborator. She is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator and designer of Nuu-chah-nulth, Gitxsan and Kwakwaka’wakw ancestry, and Associate Director of Emily Carr’s Aboriginal Gathering Place. She is a member of the Climate Justice Field School.
With thanks to the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, Mitacs, and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia for their funding support. With thanks to Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the City of Vancouver for hosting this work.
Disclaimer: the opinions and perspectives expressed within each of these posts are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and perspectives of all CJFS participants.
