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The Gender and Environment course (GN402) is the Pacific’s very first course that examines gender equality and social inclusion within the context of fisheries and aquaculture and the environment. In alignment with the PEUMP Programme’s key principle, mainstreaming of human rights and gender equality through a human rights-based approach, the Gender and the Environment course provides a forum for the critical examination and understanding of how gender plays out in environmental issues, with a focus on the Pacific Island countries. The course provides students with a holistic view on gender and environmental issues through an integrated approach that acknowledges the cross-cutting nature of gender concepts.
To mark this milestone, USP PEUMP reached out to several of the first cohorts of students and the course facilitator/lecturer for reviews on their learnings. This is the Gender and the Environment lecturer, Dr Domenica’s story.
USP is one of four key implementing partners of the PEUMP Programme, an initiative funded by the European Union and the Government of Sweden. The overall EUR 45million Programme promotes sustainable management and sound ocean governance for food security and economic growth while addressing climate change resilience and conservation of marine biodiversity. It follows a comprehensive approach, integrating issues related to ocean fisheries, coastal fisheries, community development, marine conservation and capacity building under one single regional action.
My name is Domenica Gisella Calabrò and I hail from the Mediterranean. I was born and raised in Southern Italy, specifically in Reggio Calabria, a town overlooking the strait that separates the mainland from the Sicilian Island. Through my maternal side, I have spent significant time in the countryside, and the annual grape harvest that involved extended family and neighbours, and other annual family activities like almond and olive harvesting, preparing tomato sauce conserves and drying figs were part of my upbringing.
I became aware of gendered practices, dynamics, expectations and associated inequalities from an early age. My parents kept emphasising that my younger sister and I should become independent women and that education was key to achieve that. At the same time, I absorbed specific values and practices locally associated to womanhood, which have become part of me. I equally experienced other family expectations as constraining for my self-fulfillment, if not puzzling for the way they seemed to contradict the main message. Indeed, I found many items that challenged my pursuit of ‘freedom’ as a woman within the sociocultural fabric I was part of and beyond!
In all of this, I was particularly intrigued by men within my family, starting from my father, and the kind of expectations they were dealing with. As a young woman, I sailed off and have since lived in places like UK, Northern Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, and New Zealand. It is in Pacific waters that I ‘met’ gender as a category to analyse a range of social dynamics and issues. I hold a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and have conducted extensive ethnographic research in Māori contexts. While exploring the terms in which communities and individuals have engaged with the national sport of rugby in relation to their Indigenous status, I started to examine the formulations of Māori masculinity around the game, and how those revealed issues of belonging, recognition, socioeconomic inclusion, and marginalization.
In 2018, I joined USP as lecturer and discipline coordinator in the Gender Studies Programme. In 2019, the USP-PEUMP Team approached me to work together on implementing the gender component of the PEUMP programme. That same year, we held a one-day workshop on human-centred approaches to fisheries and aquaculture together with SPC for PEUMP-funded Masters and PhD students and the students enrolled in the Postgraduate Certificate in Gender Studies. At the time, I was envisaging the development of the Postgraduate Diploma in Gender Studies, which entailed the creation of a new course.
Alert to regional needs, I had already noticed the increased call for awareness of and research on regional gender and environmental issues to impact policy-making. The plan for a gender and environment course building on the PEUMP attention to gender, fisheries and aquaculture emerged organically.
Students examine feminist theories that have addressed human relations with the environment, as well as emerging studies on men and masculinities applied to the environment, and queer ecology. They consider the relation between gender justice and environmental justice and the place for gender in environmental governance. They then look into gender-related issues concerning different aspects of the environment. While the space of fisheries and aquaculture is given particular attention, students also consider gender in the context of agriculture, forestry, water and energy, biodiversity conservation and climate change.
The course includes a range of scientific works presenting relevant scholarship. It equally integrates the Pacific Handbook for Gender Equity and Social Inclusion in Coastal fisheries and Aquaculture. This is used to examine examples of dynamics and issues contextualised to the region, and to equip students with tools for intervention. While these are specific to fisheries and aquaculture, many of the insights and responses may be transferrable to other sectors.
Finally, classes are mostly discussion-oriented and spaces that try to elicit students’ pre-existent knowledge, which is connected to their experiences within their communities and countries, and possibly their work or activism. Classes, as well as group work where students need to use story-telling provide opportunities for students to contribute to the learning journey on gender and the environment.
I have learnt a lot about gender and environment dynamics and issues, including the difficulties around discussing/integrating gender in environment-related practice, analysis and advocacy, and more broadly about the region and its needs, from the students’ realities and the tensions and aspirations they have brought in the class.
I would encourage them to start by looking for ‘gender’ in their lived realities, in their stories and histories. Also, gender as a category of analysis is cross-cutting and can be approached in the different disciplinary fields they may be interested in or operating within.
While the Gender and Environment course is part of the Postgraduate Diploma in Gender Studies, it can be taken as a one-off course by students working in environment-related sectors. It is also an elective course for students enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Environmental Studies.