Negotiating Ecological Intersectionality: Environmental Calamity, Sustainability and EcoArtt

Negotiating Ecological Intersectionality: Illuminating Environmental Calamity and Sustainability through EcoArt: As ecological crises accelerate, the interconnectedness of climate change with human societies and the need for environmental sustainability increasingly requires investigation and illumination, particularly through intersectional methodologies and their application to art. These intersectional methodologies may be defined as exposing, following K. Davis, “the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power”. How diverse genders, sexualities and ethnicities relate differently to climate change, due to their specific situatedness in power structures, institutional practices, social categorisations and knowledge production, has been exposed through multileveled intersectional investigations and illuminated through EcoArt, including Ecophotography. EcoArtists have endeavoured to reveal how power structures, categorisations and unsustainable lifestyles have contributed to the emission of greenhouse gases, global warming and ecological crises while challenging and renegotiating them in order to explore how climate change may be combated and environmental sustainability pursued. By focusing upon the Ecophotography of the Canadian, Edward Burtynsky and Bangladeshean, Munem Wasif, plus the EcoArt of English, Michael Pinsky and Australian, Janet Laurence, this presentation shall explore their diverse engagements with ecological intersectionality. After focusing upon their exposures of the impact of diverse ecological disasters, particularly in relation to new planetary awareness of environmental risks and sustainability, this presentation shall then examine how these EcoArtists also explore ways in which relations between human subjects and the global environmental imaginary may be reconceived in time and space.