Ways of Repair : Loss and Damage Symposium | SESSION #8: Transforming Loss: Mourning and Ritual in Times of Climate Crisis

n this panel discussion Queer Black Troublemaker, Black Feminist Love Evangelist, award-winning writer and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs and multidisciplinary artist Zahra Malkani considered how musical and oral traditions and ceremonies that bring together devotion and dissent, poetry and protest as forms of remembrance and resistance against environmental devastation, dispossession and erasure can meet us at the shoreline of loss to support us in finding a collective way forward in the details of our survival in this era of loss and damage from climate change. This discussion centered upon the following key topics: ecological wisdom and situated ecological knowledges, the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl and the musical and oral traditions in Pakistan.  

Very sadly writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit was not able to join us for this session as she was pulled away to urgent and important work addressing the pausing of all agency grants and loans programs by the Trump administration in the US. Read more about what is being called “an administrative coup” here.