For the last three years (give or take), the FEELed Lab has been involved in a project called “Biodiversities of Gender” (or BOG for short!)
This project (as you can read on the project page and in earlier FEELed Notes) sought to bring together ideas of gender abundance, Land relations (including being in good relations with syilx people on whose Land we work), and climate justice. All of these directions can support anticolonial ways of being and knowing, so we wanted to see what threads we could weave between them.
In its latest iteration, this work has involved teaming up with the Inspired Word Cafe (IWC) as part of a SSHRC-funded Partnership Engage Grant to help see how the already amazing queer, accessible community programming that IWC does (full gender abundance!) could more explicitly attend to Land relations, decolonization and related responsibilities. The very practical goal of the project was to develop a set of tenets or guidelines for IWC to use as a way of guiding future priorities and actions.
After several amazing workshops, performances, and events, this iteration of the project concluded this week with a final workshop, led by facilitator Erin Delfs. We explored IWC’s values and how we could more clearly articulate these with our BoG goals.
We walked, free-wrote, sculpted, moved, laughed, thought, conversed, shared, discussed, noted, danced … and in the end, came away with a clearer set of objectives and action points. We are currently finalizing these into a document, which we look forward to sharing widely and freely! Stay tuned.
The BoG lives forever!
The FEELed lab 