Astrida Neimanis, PhD

(She/They)

Associate Professor

English and Cultural Studies, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies

Other Titles: Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities
Office: CCS 370
Phone: 250.807.9185
Email: astrida.neimanis@ubc.ca

Research Summary

Feminist studies (with a focus on embodiment, ecofeminisms, material feminisms and intersectionality), environmental studies (with a focus on cultural studies of water, weather and climate change, and multispecies justice), everyday militarisms, interdisciplinarity, epistemologies and non-traditional research methodologies.

Courses & Teaching

GWST 272 / CULT 272 Feminism and Environment; ENGL 501 Methodologies: Critical Theory; IGS SUST 584: Sustainability Theme Seminar

Biography

Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic, and political connections to other bodies of water. Additional research interests include theories and practice of interdisciplinarity, feminist epistemologies, intersectionality, multispecies justice, and everyday militarisms.

Astrida’s research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, makers, educational institutions, and communities, often in the form of experimental public pedagogies. Her writing can be found in numerous academic journals and edited collections, artistic exhibitions and catalogues, and online media. Astrida joins UBCO after six years in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney on Gadigal Land, in Sydney, Australia.

Degrees

PhD, Social and Political Thought, York University (Toronto)
MSc Gender (LSE, London UK)

Research Interests & Projects

Some of my research projects include:

The FEELed Lab: Launched in 2021, The FEELed Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary environmental humanities field lab that works to amplify feminist, queer, crip, anticolonial, and antiracist perspectives to address the tangled challenges of social and environmental crisis. Alongside supporting a variety of research projects, we run workshops, online and in-person events (e.g. Fire + Water: Creative and Critical Perspectives from the Okanagan Watershed and Beyond and the Feminist Environmental Humanities Summer Symposium) that strive to be inclusive and accessible social infrastructures for conversation, exchange, co-learning and creativity. FEELed Lab contributors and collaborators include undergraduate and graduate researchers, guest academics, and artists from both our local communities and all over the world. Although “the FEELed Lab is where the FEELed Lab does,” we can often be found at the Woodhaven EcoCulture Centre. We believe that addressing difficult questions can also be affirmative and joyful.

Learning Endings is a multi-part international and interdisciplinary research project led by me, artist Patty Chang and veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, that has surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. It examines the work of scientists who perform necropsies of dead marine mammals as unacknowledged forms of attention and care, and explores how various kinds of art practice can support this care work. Including laboratory observation, expert interviews, walking art, filmmaking, community engagement, poetics, public outreach, and the sweaty work of interpersonal and interdisciplinary exchange, Learning Endings seeks different kinds of conversation about science, oceans, and human responsibility. In 2022, Learning Endings is collaborating with the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, OR to offer a series of workshops and events. Website coming soon.

Reading Group as Method is a collaboration between Composting Feminisms (Astrida Neimanis, UBCO and Jennifer Mae Hamilton), UNE, Armidale, Australia), The Ediths (Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia) and Ecofeminist Fridays (Melbourne, Australia), each of whom has convened or is currently convening environmental feminist reading groups in Australia since 2015. Our project is investigating the value of the reading group as research method, particularly in a context of the growing neoliberalization of universities, where time for reading, non-output-driven conversations with other researchers, and connections to others outside of academia is being eroded. Can reading groups be a site of resistance, care and other possibilities?

Cultivating Environmental Attention: Course Development for Accessible Environmental Humanities Field Methodologies is funded by the UBC Okanagan Learning Transformations Fund (ALT-2040). Drawing on emergent best practices in Environmental Humanities (EH) pedagogies, this project will develop and pilot a field methodologies course that centres access and inclusion, as part of the new Bachelor in Sustainability (BSust) degree. Collaborators include Madeline Donald and Greg Garrard.

Feeling Wor(l)ds, hosted by Atlas Arts (Isle of Skye, UK) is a project exploring how we might attend to the intimacies of place through being in correspondence with others. Other collaborating writers/artists are Camille Auer (FI) and Ashanti Harris (UK).

With Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Tessa Zettel, I am one part of The Weathering Collective. Since 2016 we have been experimenting with things like social infrastructure building, art practice, DIY publishing, and other collaborative practices to explore feminist responses to climate change. Our most recent publication

As one iteration of the Everyday Militarisms project I founded in 2017 with Tess Lea (when we were both still at the University of Sydney) and Caren Kaplan (UC Davis), I am currently coediting a special issue of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience on the topic of the domestication of war. My co-editors together with Xan Chacko (Wellesley), Diana Pardo Pedraza (GWU) and Jennifer Terry (UC Irvine).

From 2015 – 2022, I served as a Co-Director of The Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, based at Linkoping University, Sweden.

Alongside and in response to my various research projects, I am also currently completing my next book, The Feeling of Water.

Selected Publications & Presentations

Books

Astrida Neimanis. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury, 2017. (Open access version)

Hacking the Anthropocene! Feminist, Queer Anticolonial Propositions. Eds. Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Sue Reid, Pia van Gelder, Asrida Neimanis. Open Humanities Press. Open Humanities Press, 2021.

Thinking with Water. Eds. A. Neimanis, C. Chen and J. MacLeod. Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

Special Issues (recent):

“Feminist Environmental Humanities: what do we WANT?” Special issue of Australian Feminist Studies. Vol. 34, Issue 102 (2019). Eds. A. Neimanis and J. Hamilton.

Articles and chapters (recent):

Neimanis, A. and McLauchlan, L. Composting (in) the gender studies classroom: Growing feminisms for climate changing pedagogies. Curriculum Inquiry 52.2. (2022): 218-234.

Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J. “Falling out Together.” Feral Feminisms. Issue 10.

Neimanis, A, JM Hamilton and T. Zettel, “Feminist Infrastructure for Better Weathering.” Australian Feminist Studies. Online first October 2021.

Neimanis, A. “Learning feeling.” In A I S T I T / coming to our senses. Garrett Publications, 2021.

Neimanis, A. “Toxic Love.” Sex Ecologies. Ed. S. Hessler. MIT Press, 2021.

Neimanis, A. R. Dixon-Grovenor and C. Britton. “The River Ends as the Ocean.” Shanghai Biennale: Bodies of Water, Ed. F. Ramos, 2021.

Neimanis, A. “The Body is the Site of Climate Catastrophe” (reprint).  Oceans Rising. Eds. E. Eversberger and D. Zyman. MIT Press, 2021.

Neimanis, A. “The Weather Underwater.” Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book . Eds. Daniela Zyman and Eva Ebersberger. Sternberg Press, 2021.

Neimanis, A. and S. Chatterjee. “Intimacy without Mastery: Multispecies Justice and Knowing other Lifeworlds”. (Part of Critical Exchange, D. Celermajer et al, “Justice through a Multispecies Lens.”) Contemporary Political Theory. Vol. 19 (2020): 475-512.

Neimanis, A. ““The Chemists’ War” in Sydney’s Seas: Water, Time and Everyday Militarisms.” Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020 (on-line first).

Pratt, S., Neimanis, A. et al. “Fathom” Environmental Humanities. 12. 1 (2020): 173–178.

Neimanis, A. “The Body is the Site of Climate Catastrophe.” Rehearsing Hospitalities II. Eds. Y. Billimore and J. Parikka. Frame: Helsinki, 2020.

Neimanis, A. “Water”. Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Ed. M. Krogh. Strandberg Publishing. Forthcoming 2020.

Neimanis, A. and JM Hamilton. “Weather”. Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Ed. M. Krogh. Strandberg Publishing. Forthcoming 2020.

Neimanis, A. “The Sea, The Breathing.” Sustaining the Seas. Eds. E. Probyn, N. Lee, K. Johnston. Rowman-Littlefeld, 2020.

Neimanis, A. “The Body is the Site of Climate Catastrophe.” Rehearsing Hospitalities II. Eds. Y. Billimore and J. Parikka. Frame: Helsinki, 2020.

Neimanis, A. “Water”. Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Ed. M. Krogh. Strandberg Publishing. Forthcoming 2020.

Neimanis, A. and JM Hamilton. “Weather”. Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Ed. M. Krogh. Strandberg Publishing. Forthcoming 2020.
Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, JM. “Five Desires, Five Demands: Introduction to Feminist Environmental Humanities – What do we want?” Australian Feminist Studies. Vol 24. No. 102 (2019).

Neimanis, A. “The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism and the Breathless Sea.” Australian Feminist Studies. Vol 34. No. 102 (2019).

Neimanis, A. and Phillips, P. “Postcards from the Underground.” Journal of Public Pedagogy. November 2019.

Neimanis, A. Our Bodies, Our Wetlands. Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times. Ed. C. Sandilands. Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2019.

Neimanis, A. Held in Suspense: Chemical Weapons in the Gotland Deep. Blue Legalities. Eds. Irus Braverman and Elizabeth Johnson. Durham: Duke UP, 2019.

Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J.M. “Composting Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Humanities. 10.2 (2018): 501-527.

Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J.M. “A Field Guide to Weathering.” The Goose: Journal of the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada.

Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J. M. “Weathering.” Feminist Review. 118. (2018).

Neimanis, A. Queer Times and Chemical Weapons, Suspended in the Gotland Deep. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 5.1 (2018): 66–78.

Neimanis, A. “Water, A Queer Archive of Feeling.” Tidalectics: Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and science. Ed. S. Hessler. MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 189-198.

Neimanis, A. Material Feminisms. in The Posthuman Glossary. Ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury 2018. Pp. 242-243,

Neimanis, A. Posthuman Phenomenologies for Planetary Bodies of Water. Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities. Eds. Cecilia Asberg and Rosi Braidotti. Springer. 2018.

Neimanis, A. “Water & Knowledge.” Downstream. Eds. R. Wong and D. Christian. Wilfred Laurier UP (Environmental Humanities Series), 2017.

Neimanis, A. Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in the Anthropocene. In What if Culture was Nature All Along? ed. Vicki Kirby. Edinburgh UP, 2017.

Neimanis, A.  Thinking with Matter, Rethinking Irigaray: Bodies of Water for a Planetary Feminism. Feminist Philosophies of Life. Eds. Chloe Taylor and Hasana Sharp. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016. pp. 42-66.