Watch a video of the lecture below:
How can we practice radical climate justice as we raise our children in a world dominated by petroleum-pharmaceutical hegemonies?
Parenting in the 21st century represents perhaps one of the most contradictory positions of contemporary citizen-subjects: both the possibility for emancipation from and adaptation to convenience-culture. As an anarcha-feminist mother raising Zazu, my twelve-year-old son, I have intimately experienced intra-cultural impacts of our market-driven mediaocracy’s denial of corporeal, societal, and global interconnectedness. For example, this includes the entanglement of health toxicity, psychological damage, and historical misrepresentation embedded in addictive digital technologies and car culture. Every day I make the conscious choice to deflect and transform how this plutocrat-driven democracy, characterized by corporatized, conformist laws-of-conduct, may impact Zazu. Petroleum-parenting, what I identify as the decisions parents make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices, reifies the inertia of the status-quo and our myopic capacity to engage beyond our shame-based, mind & body, heart & soul-numbing accumulationist individualism. Parenting could evolve into an art and science of collaboration. Through a collective daily practice of magical realism–the participatory what if…, we can uproot epigenetic habituations (again for example, referring to digital technologies and car culture) as we generate sustainable and creative infrastructural transformations with and for our youth.
Relevant links:
