Connecting Care and Climate Feminist Approaches to a Green Recovery

With increasingly urgent scientific warnings, the experience of extreme weather events, and the widespread declaration of climate and ecological emergencies, it seems that, belatedly, the message delivered by Greta Thunberg and other climate activists is beginning to come home to us: our house is on fire.

But in what feels like an age of crisis, climate change appears to be in competition. Most obviously, it has frequently been eclipsed by COVID-19, including the ‘crisis in care’ which the pandemic has exposed. We are still seeing underpaid key workers and unpaid care providers placed under intense pressure and often great risk. There are also large-scale failures to meet care needs: not only a social care crisis, a mental health crisis and unprecedented hospital waiting lists, but also unequal care provision across the UK and an absence of care at the borders, exemplified by calls to meet refugees not with lifeboats, but gun boats.

But what if we refuse to see the ecological crisis and the crisis in care as two separate crises, competing for attention and resources in plans to ‘Build Back Better’?

Dr Kate Seymour from the Management and Marketing group at Essex Business School, will host a lively interactive debate exploring the common causes and assumptions behind these two crises, the risks of tackling either crisis in isolation and how we can set our own priorities to ensure a feminist green recovery.

Join us at Firstsite in Colchester on Tuesday 16 November from 7pm to 9pm. This event is part of the nationwide Festival Of Social Science, it is open to the public and completely free of charge.