Often, when thinking of academia, the ideas of books, writing, and theory are what make up the idea of the scholar. Many scholars who speak about activism, liberation, mutual aid, living in a collective community, and many other topics of concern for the JOAA team, do not always live the practice they write. This year, we are hoping to disrupt this focus on the blueprints of freedom and look into the way folks are working in the world to build, support, create, and live praxis in their lives.   

Keynote Speaker: Prof Soumhya Venkatesan with Lydia Donohue (University of Manchester)

Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions.