Date/Time
Date(s) - 22/01/2026
11:30 am - 1:00 pm

Location
LRW 1003

Research in Progress Seminar (RIPS)

Colonial Constructions of Girlhood and Climate Vulnerability: A Feminist Care Ethics Critique of Plan International’s Real Choices, Real Lives’ Program

Dr. Lindsay Robinson
McMaster University, Wilfrid Laurier University, Carleton University

This paper critically examines Plan International’s Real Choices, Real Lives (RCRL) program and its depictions of Global South girls’ climate vulnerability. This program reinforces a decontextualized, flattened, and monolithic construction of Global South girlhood that positions girls’ (climate) vulnerability as exemplified by their ‘all-encompassing’ caring responsibilities and poverty – until the Global North intervenes with educational opportunities. Drawing on transnational feminisms and feminist care ethics, this paper interrogates how the program’s notions of climate vulnerability propose and emphasize solutions to climate change – i.e., individual girl empowerment and resilience through education – that are inadequate to the structural injustices of gender and climate injustice. However, by emphasizing feminist care ethics, the paper does not dismiss the concept of vulnerability itself; instead, it aims to reposition vulnerability as an intrinsic aspect of life (in both the Global North and the Global South) and as a structural injustice intertwined with transnational, gendered relations of power.

Dr. Lindsay Robinson completed her PhD from Carleton University’s Political Science program in Fall 2024. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation, Empowering Teenage Girls to Save the Planet? Idealized Girlhood, Green Girl Power, and the ‘Girling of Climate Change’, was awarded the Carleton University Senate Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Work. Her research most centrally seeks to critically explore constructions and logics of girlhood in global politics and popular culture, particularly those made possible and meaningful through the climate crisis. Her other research interests include transnational, decolonial, and Indigenous feminist theory, girl- and youth-led global justice activism, and the interrogation of state, neoliberal capitalist, and settler-colonial power.