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Hanya ada Satu Kata: Lawan! On decolonising and building a mutual collaborative research practice on gender and climate change
Summary
This paper reflects on efforts to decolonize climate knowledge production, centering the perspectives of working-class communities in the Global South. It argues that meaningful environmental research must include the voices of those most affected by pollution and climate change.
Our title is borrowed from a famous line of Wiji Thukul's poem Peringatan (translated as Warning), about the everyday lives of the working class and their struggles to be heard, resonating with many of our experiences in working to decolonise climate knowledge production. As in Thukul's words: 'There is only one word: Fight!' We critically reflect on our recent experiences working with artists, communities, activists, and practitioners to better understand the gender-age-urban interface of climate change: how climate impacts are shaped by gender and age in urban Indonesia. In a deliberate challenge to problematic conventions of academic publishing, we choose to frame this paper around a series of creative processes focused on women's experiences and responses to climate change, including Madihina Banjarese tradition of musical storytellingand Trans Superhero Perubahan Iklim (Transgender Superheroes for Climate). We centre these different forms of knowledge and voice in our discussion as a series of provocations for researchers and practitioners to think creatively about the languages we use, the methods we draw on, the collaborations we build, how we disseminate 'academic' knowledge, and to push at institutional barriers and the boundaries of what 'inclusion' truly means at each stage of our research processes. We explore how feminist, ethnographic, and arts-led methodologies can foreground knowledge, perspectives, and art forms that are traditionally excluded in climate change knowledge productionlong dominated by colonial and patriarchal hegemonies (and tyrannies) of science and 'experts'; and unpack our un/learning in this imperfect 'fight' to decolonise our research process and build a mutual collaborative research practice.
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