How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change

Weather means heat, rain, cold and wind, but more expansively, weather also means the conditions that affect us all on a daily basis. As Neimanis and Hamilton propose, “weathering” can therefore be understood as an embodied response to climate change. Weathering is both a theoretical framework and a set of practical tools for responding to environmental catastrophe, in a world where the effects of climate change are shaped by power structures like colonialism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism. Neimanis and Hamilton suggest that the weathering framework can help us notice these effects and work towards a more equitable distribution of shelter and vulnerability. 

Anticipating the imminent publication of the speakers’ forthcoming book How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change (Bloomsbury, March 2026), this talk draws on Neimanis and Hamilton’s decade-long collaboration as founders and participants of The Weathering Collective (www.weatheringstation.net). Connecting the planetary to the personal, it asks how we can reckon with existential crisis through playful, low-tech practices. Importantly, this work also centers some of the arts and humanities’ most powerful tools: creative wordplay, social art practice, and the power of language and imagination to prefigure different kinds of futures.  

In this talk, Neimanis and Hamilton focus on the need to unlearn colonial definitions of “the weather.” Tracing the history of how the English word “weather” came to be stripped of its cultural meanings, they invite us to move towards what they call a “more-than-meteorological” definition of weather, and use metaphor to connect the domains of social injustice and environmental harm. They draw on examples from Indigenous, Black feminist and public health scholarship to demonstrate how structural disadvantage is also a kind of weather that accumulates in the body. In a time of climate change, Neimanis and Hamilton insist that we need to understand this social weather as related to literal heat waves and flash floods of environmental crisis. In turn, we need to learn how to weather together, differently, in order to hopefully change the weather. Despite the urgency of the crisis, for many of us this will necessarily be a slow process of unlearning and transformation, like rocks weathered by water. This process can also cultivate a slow politics of solidarity and resistance capable of reckoning with the changes to come.  

Weathering as a framework and practice is also resolutely feminist: it insists that any climate actions without feminism would simply uphold many miseries of the present. Neimanis and Hamilton thus also explore how gender studies tactics and concepts can help guide us in developing an embodied politics of solidarity that is necessarily anticolonial, antiracist, queer, gender expansive, and multibeing.  Part of this work, as Neimanis and Hamilton describe, requires building community-scaled social infrastructures for our shared but different worlds. 

Speakers:  

Dr. Astrida Neimanis

Astrida Neimanis is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities and Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan, on the unceded lands of the syilx people. As a practice-led feminist theorist, Astrida writes about water, weather and bodies, often in collaboration with artists, scientists, writers and other community members. They are author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), and co-author of How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change (March 2026), with Jennifer Hamilton. Astrida is also Director of The FEELed Lab – a feminist environmental humanities creative research lab in Kelowna, BC, Canada.

Dr. Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Dr Jennifer Mae Hamilton lives and works on Anaiwan Country as a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of New England. Their interdisciplinary research explores weather, embodiment and affect from a queer feminist perspective. Current projects include Community Weathering Station and the Armidale Climate and Health Project. Forthcoming publications are “Thermoregulation” with TEXT Journal (December 2025) and, as co-author, How to weather together: Feminist practice for climate change (March 2026) with Astrida Neimanis. This summer the How to weather together book project is also an exhibition at the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM), showcasing their work with The Weathering Collective alongside several other artists working on adjacent themes. They are a branch committee member of the NTEU and, as complement to their research and community practice, they are currently studying a diploma of Shiatsu and Oriental Therapies part time.

Chair: Dr. Natali Pearson

Dr Natali Pearson is a DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her current research explores WWII shipwrecks in Southeast Asia as sites of ecological, political, and ethical entanglement. Drawing on marine archaeology, area studies, environmental humanities and feminist frameworks, her work seeks to reimagine maritime heritage diplomacy and ocean governance for an uncertain future. Natali serves in leadership roles with Indonesia Council, ICOMOS and the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, and co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies podcast.