Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of Maine
2019 to 2020
Research Fellow
Women's Transnational Technological Activism and the Origins of Ecological Domesticity, 1960-1989
My research focuses on the 1960s to 1980s grassroots activism in North America that developed technological and ecological critiques of militarization, agricultural practices, and energy production. Activists presented “small-scale” technologies as alternatives to what they saw as socially and ecologically destructive practices, merging material activism with systems-based epistemologies. They created novel conceptualizations of the interconnections between bodies, homes, and a unified global ecosystem. Women played an integral role in revealing the connections between military technologies, ecological systems, and the home as a site of geopolitics. I look specifically at the ways women’s actions produced ecological epistemologies; promoted the idea of ecology as a form of social practice and protest; and, in the process, transformed homes into ecologically responsible, and responsive, spaces. I am particularly interested in gendered differences of labor, as well as the ways the ecological, domestic ideals created by such activists reverberated into international aid policy.
To read more about Emma's work, click here.