Cate Sandilands
Professor
Environmental Studies
York University
United States of America
Biography
Since my appointment to the Faculty in 1994, I have considered my primary task as a teacher, writer and researcher to be the cultivation of the “plurality” of which Arendt writes so eloquently. We build and perceive a common world only insofar as we are articulate and passionate speakers of our own, unique relationships to it. This necessary connection of worldliness and plurality strikes me (even if it might not have Arendt) as especially true for our relationships to natural environments: only by developing a deeply particular understanding of the natural communities of which we are a part can we appear to one another in common to discuss them, and only by holding our perceptions up to the scrutiny of others can we understand our own individuality.
Research Interest
"Environmental cultural studies Environmental/ecological literary criticism, environmental writing Sexuality, gender and environments: queer ecologies, ecological feminisms Nature and environment in social and political thought Everyday human/plant relations, vegetality, and botanical biopolitics"
Publications
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In progress, “Ecology,” for Imre Szeman, Justin Sully and Sarah Blacker (eds.), A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory, Wiley-Blackwell (2016).
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In progress, “Emplanting Publics: Vegetal Life and Environmental Politics,” for Teena Gabrielson et. al (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, Oxford University Press (2016).
