Interlude 2 ~ Educating Women: Green Colonialism or The Maternal Gift Economy
Cara Judea Alhadeff
March 2022
Above: Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rachel Carson, Jimmy Carter. Click the image to enlarge.
Right: Emma Lazarus, Micaela Amateau Amato's “Welcome The Stranger” exhibition, Philadelphia's National Liberty Museum, International Women's Day, 2019. Click the image to enlarge
Realizing the potential of women is the single most important pathway to planetary regeneration.
—Paul Hawken
Yes, but how?
Many environmental activists claim that empowering women through education is key to “tackling the climate crisis”— reducing 59.6- 85 gigatons of carbon by 2050.”[1] Western activists must recognize the hypocrisy of assuming there can be monolithic “education,” and must distinguish between literacy and “education.” We must also be cautious of what David Abrams calls the “spell of literacy” that ranks “alphabetic civilization” above all “kinship commons” (Leah Penniman).
Beyond reading/writing, literacy includes ecoliteracy, media, civic, and consumer literacy.[2] Ideally, education performs its original meaning, “to draw out,” an evolving re-membering in the learning-teaching symbiotic exchange. While we should heed the words of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate: “Every girl, no matter where she lives, no matter what her circumstance, has a right to learn,”[3] we must be hypervigilant about the distinction between formalized education and learning.
What happens when “education” becomes a tool of imperialism, and by extension, green colonialism another brand of greenwashing—corporate co-optation of people's needs, the earth, distorting climate-crisis solutions? Importing colonialist education versus reviving and supporting indigenous wisdom and practices have radically different agendas: maintaining growth-economy industrialization versus reigniting fertile decentralized, earth-based, and reciprocal local-knowledge histories—embedded in the maternal gift economy: a gift-based economy[4] and values-culture grounded in compassion, not competition. Throughout this essay, although I foreground the maternal gift economy, implicit are a multitude of holistic-systems' economies rooted in diversity, interconnectedness, and nurturance (including bioregional economies like S.O.U.L. Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local and
social permaculture,
sacred economics,
circular economics,
solidarity economics,
custodial-storytelling indigenous pattern-thinking economics,
Buen Vivir (de-growth South American concept of “living well”), Ubuntu (the Xhosa people of South Africa’s word meaning, “I am because you are”), and the Mayan en lak ech (“you are the other me”).
All of these non-industrialized economies have in common relational ways of thinking, not formulaic metrics. For those of you who desire operational definitions, I suggest a willingness to meander into the unknown...lest we forget that the words “economy” and “ecology” derive from the Greek oikos, meaning home.
For this month's Mother Pelican exploration, I delve into the unintended consequences (unintended by well-meaning activists, not self-serving corporations) of importing Western-industrialized education as a climate-crisis intervention. March 8th, International Women's Day offers an opportunity to reexamine the distillation of female empowerment and reframe it within reciprocity that fosters equity—equitable financial, creative, collaborative tools.
I realize I am treading on thin ice, and given the rate of glacier melt, I need to watch my step. I acknowledge that, as Hawken tells us in his Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation: “There is overwhelming evidence that an educated populace of women radically reduces infant mortality, child marriage, family size, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. Conversely, it increases health, economic well-being, agricultural yields,and social stability.”[5] Yet, how we proceed in supporting women must shift from Western colonial concepts of progress and development that are supported through “access to education.” Martin Luther King, Jr. warned that we must be wary of “tokens used to obscure the persisting reality of segregation and discrimination.”[6]
Let's begin by interrogating the insidious nature of corporate-capitalist education as a form of indoctrination—complicity in our own backyard. Manufactured consent (Noam Chomsky) (sustained compliance through “persuasion psychology”) is intricately woven into our Orwellian lives. Western institutionalized education is one of the mechanisms that maintains manufactured consent. Centuries of colonialism and imperialism have taught us that education too often results in patriarchal domination and cultural erasure. Paulo Freire reminds us that
“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”[7]
“Education” is positioned as a basic, universal human right. However, if we dig deeper, we find that corporatized education is rooted in relinquishing our bodies and minds to colonialist mentality founded on predatory capitalism (privatization of all “resources”).[8]
My mother taught me to dig deeper. In 2019, the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia honored my mother, Micaela Amateau Amato, the award for International Women's Day during her exhibit “Welcome The Stranger: Reimagining Heroes Past and Present.” As a fundamental response to climate chaos, Genevieve Vaughan, founder of the multicultural all-woman Foundation for a Compassionate Society, advises citizens to receive rather than reject refugees. Such hospitality is at the core of “welcoming the stranger” implicit in maternal gift economies[9] . In stark contrast, British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson's “solution” to climate crisis is to create new nation-states to keep out immigrants. Vandana Shiva reminds us that this capitalist-patriarchal-egoist mindset “causes destruction, but blames the victim.”
Let's examine the insidious manifestations of green colonialism in what I call humanitarian imperialism—how Western industrial standard of living dictates and breeds reckless consumption resulting in global poverty and climate collapse. Colonialist education goes hand in hand with development models that reinforce the roots of poverty. Ranging from the mission of Peace Corps to thousands of NGOs, the history of exporting U.S.-style democracy reflects this humanitarian imperialism. Under the guise of the common good and universal values, humanitarian imperialism has emerged as a neocolonialist method of reproducing the unquestioned status quo of mechanized, “First World,” “developed” nations.[10]
In our petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted cyber-world, we should be wary of how our collusion with corporate and imperial forms of domination sustains the techno-euphoric race into a sanitized, hyper-electrified-5G future. When we talk about empowerment-through-education without qualifying curricular specifics, we are potentially reproducing global consumer-capitalist paradigms—reinforcing habituated obedience by maintaining what my former professor and mentor, Ivan Illich, called the knowledge industry. As Hawken states: “Every industry is a system, and every industrial system is extractive, whether it be energy, food, agriculture, pharma, transport, clothing, or healthcare, [banking, war, politics, plastics, poverty].”[11] Education must be included in this list of industries.
I reflect on the Western industrial imposition of education as global liberation in the context of March 8th International Women's Day in order to highlight our ambiguous complicity with economies of disconnection leading to cultural erasure—the “greater-than/less-than deception.”[12] Since the Industrial Revolution, education has become a tool for capitalism—reproducing consumers to maintain cycles of progress and economic growth. These socialized norms have become so deeply ingrained in us that our ability critically evaluate has been radically distorted. Just as he warned us of internalized fascism[13],
Foucault challenged us to “think differently.” Like my mother, Foucault incites us: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.” However, the norm is that our cognitive stupor feeds into the “urban-industrial-vehicular-commercial-technological-pharmaceutical-electronic-information spectator” society. In contrast, Ralph Nader calls for a cultural upheaval that revokes corporate personhood reigning over the commercialization of childhood, education, and other attacks on citizen’s capacity to think—manufacturing a “nation of sheep.” Similarly, Shiva declares: “I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions.”[14]
Vandana Shiva. Click the image to enlarge.
By deploying statistics such as “Today, 62 million girls are denied the right to attend school,”[15] we may be bypassing the fact that “school” too often reproduces the very systems of oppression that “education” is meant to disrupt and hopefully transform. Instead of adopting the oversimplication that women's education is a primary solution for climate chaos, we must revamp our educational systems to reflect traditional cultural values of maternal gift economies. For International Women's Day 2022 and Earth Day 2022, Shiva declares there must be “a mobilization globally of reclaiming the gift economy...and preventing it from being hijacked” by corporate interests feigning care for nature[16]. Asset-management companies like BlackRock (financial enslavement) and corporations like Monsanto (seed enslavement)[17] and Nestlé (water enslavement)[18] appropriate/steal the commons—including colonialist-educational models by determining how[19] we educate and what curriculums are being used.
Misdirected goals are founded on three misdirected motivations:
Misdirected motivation #1: Education contributes to economic growth. [20]
Whose economic growth? To be sure, women-owned businesses, becoming doctors, legislators, and lawyers contribute to the well being of their communities, however these “acquisitions” should not come at the expense of their heritage. Not the economia, the art of living/ the art of giving, that Shiva calls for. Rather, education too often enables corporate growth through extraction economies that lead to “development” and "progress." Once again, although the following statistics are persuasive, the implications are extraordinarily precarious:“Empowering women and girls in developing countries ranked second among 76 solutions for curbing global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to... Project Drawdown. [21] ”The term “developing” is a red flag that must be investigated: “...too often in the name of ‘development’, human creativity is destroyed by dull, homogenizing education systems.”[22]
Putting the onus on women to absorb the effects of globalization by adapting colonialist strategies in the guise of “opportunity,” the education-growth-economy justification displaces responsibility while it supports corporate welfare. This form of education is not an invitation to expand women's consciousnesses and sustainable economic opportunities. As stated above, we must support educational and economic infrastructures that reflect their indigenous cultural values and traditional wisdoms—such as the maternal gift economy. We (those of us educated in Western norms) are the ones who need to be educated. In order to radically shift climate chaos, we can learn time-tested strategies from these economies.
Misdirected motivation #2: Education reduces the global population.
Globally, it has been repeatedly proven that women who receive family planning support, have less babies. However, positing the correlation between population explosion and environmental catastrophe again bypasses the roots of the conjoined crises. Barbara Duden's research on “population” is absolutely essential if we are to deconstruct the overpopulation buttress in the Development scaffolding and rebuild reproductive justice. Duden ends her chapter titled “Population” in Wolfgang Sachs' invaluable anthology, The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, cites Reproductive and Genetic Engineering:[23] the call to acknowledge the “racist eugenic and patriarchal tradition inherent in the perception of the population catastrophe.'” Far surpassing the positive environmental impact of family-planning education of indigenous women is the exponential environmental devastation caused by industrial societies (ranging from mainstream production-consumption-disposal habits to our military's fuel consumption and cancerous burn pits[24]).
Misdirected motivation #3: Education requires electricity for nighttime studying and cellular technologies.
Access to “education” is confused with empowerment, and empowerment is conflated with access to electricity and digitization. The export-import model of education too frequently relies on electricity infrastructures to be installed throughout the Global South.[25] The romanticization of education as an answer to climate crisis parallels the uncritical agenda of electricity as emancipatory, regardless of its power source—coal, oil, and gas, or solar, wind, or otherostensible renewable energies. Aside from the extraordinarily problematic assumption and implementation that education requires electrical infrastructures,[26] the perceived solution of technocratic fixes exemplifies what social ecology anarchist, Murray Bookchin calls a “fetishization of needs.”[27] Education that requires electricity and digitization is capitalism.
For example, Google’s blitzkrieg campaign to promote and supply cell-phones throughout nonindustrial countries reflects this perfidious illusion of the public good. Google’s One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, is an example of the violence of corporatizing equalities. The initiative that provides (at a cheaper rate, as if a lower price is equated with accessible and culturally appropriate usage) computer laptops to children throughout the non-industrial world illustrates this dis-placement of technology in environments where other structural needs are paramount, such as agricultural or water recuperation from transnational corporate theft. Such imperialist digital utopianism demonstrates misplaced priorities—creating more problems than it solves. An anonymous HR recruiter at New York City Google’s office who I interviewed on this subject failed to recognize the hazardous environmental and health impacts, the ineffective educational strategy (language-specific books are an actual need), and the neocolonizing effects of depositing computers without cultural relevancy or technological support. These tactics serve as another example of sound-bite education. This proliferation of technology serves to obliterate cultural difference and cause psychological trauma—throughout the world and within the U.S.[28]
Kenneth Saltman, author of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools and The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education, invited me to collaborate on a documentary film addressing critical pedagogy, privatization, and the corporate takeover of the U.S. public educational system.[29] For example, Educational Management Organizations (EMOs), like HMOs, subvert public governance and discipline (in Foucault’s terms) the labor force. EMOs are a manifestation of Paulo Freire’s critique of neoliberal education as banking: “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.”[30]
Through the lens of de-politicized ideology, the refrain of our film would ask, how do we learn and what is learning? We explore how public intellectuals, performance artists, and top physicists (like Watson and Crick whose work clearly transgresses the argument for standardized testing and homogenized forms of pedagogy) represent a polysemic dialectic. How do we foster an imaginative society and cultivate radical inquiry? What does it mean to live and produce in a democracy of the commons versus a commercial culture, focused on consumption, entertainment, and market fundamentalism?[31]
Illich investigates the implications of pervasive compulsory education.[32] He warns that we must recognize “the mass production of education as a paradigm for other industrial enterprises.” Education can become a Trojan horse concealing the agendas of industrialized-extractive capitalism.[33]
In the early 1990s, I traveled to Bangladesh through the Hubert Humphrey Program at Penn State University. In addition to visiting poor rural women engaging in Grameen Bank practices, we met with the ministries of culture, finance, agriculture, education, and the president of Bangladesh, Abdur Rahman Biswas. As the IMF, World Bank, Voice of America, and big agribusiness were busy shaping private and public ideologies of wealth, the Human Development Index (HDI) classified Bangladesh as the “least developed country of the least developed countries”—the LDC of the LDCs.[34]
Coupled with “aid” organizations’ embrace of white man’s burden, “coming to the rescue of those in need,” internationally marginalized populations personified the reductive-universalizing concept of economic poverty. As many Bangladeshis internalized this image of themselves as destitute, corporate colonialism reigned through infrastructural dependency on plutocratic nations, enforcing U.S.-style democracy that ensured cultural erasure. Whether the poorest rural woman or the president of Bangladesh, every Bangladeshi introduced themselves with an apology for their apparent poverty. They didn't know they were poor until they had been told; year after year, the World Bank, IMF, and Voice of America infiltrating their psyches and individual and social bodies, they finally absorbed the “fact” of their poverty. Poverty had become the unquestioned reference point from which the Bangladeshis would define their self-worth and cultural value.
As I now challenge the so-called self-evident necessity for women's education, I recall how scrutinizing the USIA-sponsored food-aid mission laid the foundation for my later work deconstructing international development politics and environmental justice. Never “content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes” (MLK, Jr.),[35] what I then witnessed has helped me now unravel the implications of bypassing institutional roots of poverty created by transnational neocolonialist interventions. Shiva describes how Bangladesh never had seed or water famines, until now: extractive industries have led to scarcity, displacing millions.
“Education” is not a solution to this scarcity, “educating” as indoctrination is part of the problem.
Thirty years later, not only in Bangladesh but globally, floods and drought have become the new normal—an international epidemic framed within the diagnosis of climate change rather than examining the entangled roots of ecological collapse. Too many activists, economists, scientists, scholars, journalists, educators, and other “climate liberators” are unwittingly responsible for “symptom-reaction syndrome”—unsustainable “solutions” to corporate oligarchy—this includes the “derivative bondage” (MLK, Jr.) of exporting extractavist education—one of the most insidious forms of green colonialism.
By denying systemic causes and preventative practices, these institutional Band-Aids for catastrophic drought/floods lead to refugee chaos, tribal warfare, brutal water battles, and mass extinction. They reproduce what Rob Nixon writes about: ‘slow violence’ that describes how the threats wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war insidiously work their way into our daily lives.[36]
Education in the process of ideological colonization has been particularly strong. Universidad de la Tierra, or Unitierra, in Oaxaca, Mexico, for example, was created in response to a belief that ‘[t]he school has been the main tool of the State to destroy the Indigenous people’. Unitierra has created a learning ethic that is more closely based on Indigenous educational practice and that emphasizes informal, peer-supported project-based education over the hierarchical model of the conventional teacher–student relationship.[37]
To be clear, I am not claiming that rural, non-industrialized communities “go without,” but critically interrogate the concept of education within interlocking socio-economic systems. As I described in detail in last month's Mother Pelican,“Blood Chocolate—A Call for Bioregionalism,” S.O.U.L is one such holistic approach founded on accountability-based collective action. S.O.U.L reflects the values and structures in multicultural indigenous wisdoms, ancient technologies, and “feminine knowledge” in what Shiva calls Grandmother’s Universities: “What we need are Grandmother’s Universities. All over the world.”[38] For example,
Sentipensar inhabits the ancestral knowledge and people’s economies, as seen in the projects of young people from Afro descendant communities in southwestern Colombia such as the Yurumangu River and La Alsacia. In these autonomous projects, youth and women confront the patriarchal capitalist model of education and economics that has amputated the communal forms of embodied knowledge and life-worlds.[39]
Shiva reminds us that the maternal gift economy, a foundation for education, “does no harm,”[40]primum non nocere[41] My experiences in the early 1990s living with the Quijos Quichua in the Ecuadorian rainforest, learning from the women's ethnobotanical practices, offer one personal example of a transcultural Grandmother University that can inform bioregional implementations of S.O.U.L. Similarly, while living at Earthaven Ecovillage, my 10 year-old son, Zazu, weekly visited elders to learn wood carving, drafting, carpentry, weaving, biodynamic gardening and permaculture. These shared practices demonstrate sustainable change, embodying intimacy between education and daily life. And, as Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: “A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”[42]
[2] See my discussion of bioregional consumer literacy in my “Disentangling Green Colonialism: Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewables Revolution,” Shifting Climate – Shifting People, Ed. Miguel De LaTorre, Pilgrim Press, 2022, 14.
[4] Simone Wører, “Gift Economy,” Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta, eds., Pluriverse: A Post-Capitalist Dictionary. Southborough, MA: Tulika Books, 2019, 191-194.
[5] Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. New York: Penguin Books, 137.
[6]Why We Can't Wait, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963, 23.
[7]Pedagogy of the Heart. New York: Continuum, 1997, 53.
[8] Conversation with Eric Cheyfitz (The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States), Ecovillage Ithaca, 2016.
[9] See my “Disentangling Green Colonialism: Greenwashing and Environmental Racism in the Renewables Revolution,” Shifting Climate – Shifting People. Ed. Miguel De LaTorre, Pilgrim Press, 2022.
[10] In Regeneration, Hawken details the myriad horrors of Industry, 215, 5. The Knowledge Industry needs to be part of this investigation.
[11] See Tyson Yunkaporta's beautiful discussion of “how Indigenous Knowledge works” in his Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. New York: Harper One, 2020, 32.
[12] See Chapter 1, Self-Censorship: Toxic Mimicry, Internalized Fascism, and Phallic Norms, in my Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, State College: Penn State University Press, 2013.
[19] Education throughout the Global South relies on electrical-power infrastructures.
[20] Precariously, Hawken shifts between positioning #1 education as the key to “upward mobility, contributing to economic growth” (82) and #2 the importance of education as an integrated, hybrid cross-cultural endeavor: girls and women “can fuse inherited knowledge with new information accessed through the written words...educated women can marshal multiple ways of knowing” (81-82).
[22]Pluriverse: A Post-Capitalist Dictionary, xix.
[23] Christa Wichterich, “From the struggle against 'Overpopulation' to the Industrialization of Human Production,” Vol. I, No. I (1988) pp. 21-30.
[24] “Smoke Screens,” The New York Times Magazine, January 16, 2022, 34.
[25] See my “When the cure becomes the disease: Climate Crisis Inflammation,” Mother Pelican: November, 2021: Our earth now is almost fully wired. The barbarism of civilization is founded on this barrage of electric frequencies. By 2030, one billion people are expected to get electricity for the first time (See Zazu Dreams, 47). We celebrate the possibility and implementation of global access. Ranging from... Drawdown to ecofeminist activism such as the documentary, “Arise,” we are told that global electrification is the answer to our climate emergency—regardless of cultural erasure and ecological impact. Access to electricity conflated with empowerment through access to 'education' leads to conformist assimilation: equality-as-adaptation. ” See section in “Arise” on Bata Bhurij and the Barefoot College in India—specifically their focus on women making and using solar lanterns.
[27] Originally public shed in the early 1960s, Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Chico: CA, AK Press, 2004, xxx.
[28] See Entitlement and Equality Chapter 2 in Viscous Expectations for my detailed discussion of these corrupt neoliberal practices.
[29] For further details, see my Viscous Expectations, 70.
[30] Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 1993: Chapter Two. Cited in Viscous Expectations, 70.
[31] Recent independent films address some of these complexities. “Waiting for Superman” explores current educational facilities as “failure factories,” “drop-out factories,”and “academic sinkholes” that drive the “bewildered herd.” Walter Lipmann states, “The things we’ve done to help our schools work better have become the things that prevent them from working.” “A Place Out Of Time: The Bordentown School” describes an all black, co-ed school identified as “an educational utopia when discrimination was law and custom” was forced to shut down because of Brown vs. Board’s Separate but equal schools were deemed illegal. Ironically and pathetically the school was transferred into a mental health asylum in 1957 and in 1993, the asylum was shut down and became the State Juvenal Justice system. And as with every incarceration facility in the US, it is populated mostly by blacks. Also, see Carol Black’s 2010 critical education documentary, Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden.
[32] Phenomenal white male outspoken education critics include John Gallo Taylor (Dumbing Us Down), Neil Postman (Teaching As a Subversive Activity), and my former professor and mentor, Henry Giroux (On Critical Pedagogy).
[33] Equality and its fallacious language of equity is the Trojan horse that ferries corporate capitalism into the mainstream. See my “Spiritual Intelligence: Embodied Energy and the End of Consumer-Waste Culture,” Philosophy as Practice in the Ecological Emergency: An Exploration of Urgent Matters. Ed. Lucy Weir, Palgrave Macmiilan, 2022.
[34] “Bangladesh was once been referred to as a ‘basket case’ by Kissinger’s aids and as the ‘test case’ for development by World Bank staffers in the 80s/90s, but it has since come to be celebrated for the ‘Bangladesh paradox.’” Email correspondence with Dr, Paul Gilbert, University of Sussex, Imagining the Unseen, 20 pictures of debt's empires now and then, 2019.
[35] Dr. King here addressing the white business community in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can't Wait, 87.
[41] See my discussion of the excruciating pharmaceutical ironies of the bioethical principal primum non nocere: “Decolonizing Our Wombs: Gender Justice and PetroPharma Culture,” Women, Violence and Resistance. Ed. Hager Ben Driss, University of Tunis, Tunisia.
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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