09/15/2026
JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “Feminist and Pan-African Resistance at UNFCCC Climate Negotiations” with Frances Roberts-Gregory, Feminist Political Ecologist, HBCU Green Fund.
🕤 Sept. 18 (Friday), 12 pm
đź“Ť Sewall 570 & Zoom
đź”— Zoom registration: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/HXrtDE3sSauByG-iJXJC7g?_x_zm_rtaid=kOrGpYLtSeOOMLhZQr5dmw.1789485190809.00b487ec3a72ff6c1f3db6688f77bc8d&_x_zm_rhtaid=873
Environmental governance shapes resource distribution and subjection to premature death, playing out a necropolitics of who lives and who dies. Critical environmental, energy, and climate justice scholars moreover inquire into how women, q***r communities, and people of African descent resist this precarity, the logical result of state-corporate crime. Feminist political ecologists likewise expose the lack of attention to gender in environmental studies and highlight the links between gendered vulnerability to climate change and the androcentricity of extractive economies in anthropology. Despite these intellectual advancements, pan-African and feminist organizations continue to be vastly underrepresented in climate policy debates and imaginings of climate solutions. I methodologically employ Black feminist autoethnography, conversational interviews, policy analysis, and archival creation to investigate how Black and Indigenous women navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries, build transnational solidarity, and advance feminist advocacy. I will focus on work at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COPs) including the recent COP 30 in Belém, Brazil along with insights from 10+ years of feminist political ecology research.
Dr. Frances Roberts-Gregory is a Feminist Political Ecologist, Ecowomanist Storyteller, and Performance Artist (dancer and cosplayer). She leads environmental education, climate advocacy, and youth engagement projects for BIPOC, q***r, abolitionist, and feminist organizations committed to grassroots community solutions, translocal philanthropic organizing, and intersectional environmental, energy, and climate justice.
Trained as an environmental scientist, climate anthropologist, and community geographer, Dr. Roberts-Gregory researches the role and political priorities of U.S. Afrodiasporic communities, BIPOC youth, and women’s organizations at United Nations climate negotiations as well as Black and Indigenous women’s everyday strategies of resistance to environmental violence and state-corporate crime. Her postdoctoral feminist activist research likewise supports capacity-building for ecofeminist and pan-African transnational coalitions through the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal, the UNFCCC Women and Gender Constituency, and the Global Afro-Descendants Climate Justice Collaborative. She formerly taught as a Visiting Faculty at Tulane University, Bard Early College New Orleans, the UN-affiliated University for Peace in Costa Rica, and the School for International Training (SIT) International Honors Program across Ecuador, Morocco, and Nepal.
Dr. Roberts-Gregory earned a BA in Environmental Science, Sociology, and Anthropology from Spelman College and a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. She later completed postdoctoral fellowships at Northeastern University and the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) at the Salata Institute for Climate & Sustainability. Dr. Roberts-Gregory additionally served as a Climate Justice Program Officer at the Foundation for Louisiana and as a Program Director of Leadership Development at the Northeastern University Initiative for Energy Justice. Past and current partners include the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), Black in Environment, The Green Leadership Trust, The Chisholm Legacy Project, and the Environmental Grantmakers Association. She formerly served on the board of the Hive Fund for Climate & Gender Justice and currently serves on the boards of One Square World, Climate Critical, and the HBCU Green Fund.
