Feminismo/s (Jan 2025)
Transversal Movements between Gender and Environment: Interdisciplinarity in Higher Education
Abstract
Gender and environmental political analysis have had many common goals, articulated as, for example, ecofeminism. The two concepts can be thought of together, for example in regard to the unequal gendered vulnerability to the effects of climate change. However, in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, gender-specific indicators were integrated into most of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), though not into the goals directly aimed at ecological sustainability. This is one example of how gender is being marginalized in relation to environmental issues. A crucial context for combining gender and environmental studies is higher education and interdisciplinary education. The aim of this paper is to analyse syllabus texts that describe the content of courses with a joint focus on gender and environmental studies. Syllabi were retrieved through the Swedish admission system, which lists all courses and programmes offered at Swedish universities for the coming academic years. Using a qualitative method, intertextual relations of syllabi were mapped and the concepts of gender and environment analysed. The focus on intertextual relations between syllabi and theoretical, scholarly, disciplinary and policy contexts places syllabi in the wider context of interdisciplinary higher education, with its implicit structures of disciplinary centring, marginalization and transversal shifting of perspectives, which also points to the disciplinary status of Gender Studies in academia. More than half of the syllabi found were for courses and programmes offered at Gender Studies departments (or their equivalent). In these contexts, gender and environment were articulated within a frame of meta-theoretical accounts of disciplinary power, scrutinizing categorizations and conceptualizations in, for example, Natural Sciences. In the courses taught in other disciplines, gender was merely a perspective on the core concepts of, for example, developmental studies and relied more on empiricist notions of gender as a preconceived category.
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