2024 Conference - Ecology, Gender, and the Arts of Asia

Rooted Reflections: Ecology, Gender, and the Arts of Asia

The Collective hosted its second conference virtually in Spring 2024 on the theme of Gender and the Environment. The “environment” is broadly defined, encompassing realms from the earthly to the lived and imagined. How then might disciplinary norms be further challenged if ecofeminism were mobilized in the study of the material cultures of Asia and an ecological or ecocritical method employed to consider the relationship between gender, the environment, and visual material? This conference facilitated conversations around the study of these relationships in pre-modern and modern contexts by exploring themes like ecocriticism, zoocriticism, trans-corporeality, new materialisms, matter, urban theory, and placeness. More information can be found here about conference schedule and the panels.

Through four different thematic lenses - Regeneration, Soteriology, Agency, and Self-fashioning – presenters address these rich interrelationships in material ranging from Angkorian stone to Taiwanese painting, bringing into relief the timeless yet timely role of the natural environment in various articulations of gender expression and their manifestations in religious or social settings.