Event date: October 30, 5-7p.m. Event Venue: To be sent to the registered participants
Background & Rationale
As global discussions focus on climate action, the green transition and environmental solutions, it is important to ask who pays the cost of this transition, who decides how the transition looks like, and whose land, labour, and lives are treated as expendable in the process?
In Armenia, environmental degradation is not a distant issue. For years, we see the problems of mining, extraction, pollution, and pressure on natural resources transform local communities and create consequences for people living in and around affected areas. It is also undeniable to keep in mind that these consequences are gendered.
Women experience environmental and economic changes in ways that remain invisible in discussions about development and environment. They may carry increased care responsibilities, experience economic insecurity, face changes in their communities and livelihoods, or become targets of harassment and disinformation when they challenge powerful economic and political interests.
At the same time, environmental advocacy itself can become a contested space where critical environmental activists and researchers who question extractive practices or dominant narratives may face gendered delegitimization and pressures to remain silent.
The aim of this event is to bring interconnected experiences together and create a space for a feminist discussion of environmental justice in Armenia. We aim to create a feminist space for discussing the gendered consequences of mining, extraction, and environmental degradation in Armenia while highlighting the experiences, research and resistance of women and marginalized communities affected by these processes.
Panel Discussion
1.The invisible cost of extraction
Contributor: Success Lady NGO — The Silent Sufferers: Women at the Heart of Mining
2. Mining beyond the mine: gender, cities, and everyday life
Contributor: Urban Imagination: Sociological Research Laboratory — Mining and Gender Justice in Urban Settings
3. Who gets to speak? Women environmental activists and gendered disinformation
Contributor: Researcher Narine Yeganyan — Consequences of Gender Disinformation on the Public Activities of Women Eco-Activists
4. The cost of going green: energy poverty and rural women
Contributor: Arevik Hambardzumyan — research on rural women’s heating practices, energy efficiency, and the gendered impacts of energy poverty in Armenia
To take part in this event, please sign up here.
