Women and the environment: power on the ground and in academia

We taught a course that created a dialogue between academia and social movements.

In 2020, we began teaching a course on women, science and the environment to undergraduate and graduate ecology students at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The course included lessons from many Brazilian women who lead social movements. We selected speakers on the basis of our networks and knowledge of the field, and we drew on their experiences to build the content.

The inspiration for this course came from a talk delivered by two women at ECO 2019, an event organized by graduate students to discuss graduate life and research. They used the trajectories of four often-overlooked female scientists to address the challenges faced by women as graduate students, and the scarcity of women in senior positions in our department.

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