Citizen Science, Environmental, Citizenship and Women's Ornithological Writing in Nineteenth Century

Clara Contreras Ameduri (Universidad de Extremadura) will give an online seminar titled "Citizen Science, Environmental, Citizenship and Women's Ornithological Writing in the Nineteenth Century". Despite the many confining associations between women and birdcage imagery in Victorian culture, female involvement in the observation of birds was instrumental in the period’s transferring of women’s activity from the private to the public sphere in Britain, the United States and colonial South Africa. This talk therefore examines how women’s ornithological writing facilitated female participation in scientific research and political activism in the nineteenth century. By focusing on birdwatching as an early form of what Alan Irwin defines as citizen science, it is possible to explore how nature writing encouraged women’s environmental advocacy, thus fomenting female autonomous expression in the male-dominated field of natural history. Women’s ornithological literature therefore anticipated ecofeminist approaches to avifauna, allowing for subversive excursions into nature which dissolved the restrictions of the normative ‘angel in the house.’ 

This seminar will be held online. Registration is free and required. Please email katarzyna.paszkiewicz@uib.es to register.