Khaoula Bengezi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and a graduate associate at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Currently Khaoula is researching global responses to climate change in the Sahara Desert through renewable energy transitions vis-à-vis clean energy technologies. She is particularly interested in examining how environmental expertise are constructed, legitimized and articulated in sustainable development projects in North Africa through a multi-scalar case study approach. Her work centres the experiences of local small-scale farmers, particularly women and how the construction of climate mitigation technologies have affected their ability to survive in the desert. Khaoula’s approaches are informed by an array of intersecting interdisciplinary approaches including global environmental governance, critical science and technology scholarship and decolonial political ecology. Moreover, for the past three years she has been the program coordinator for Righting Relations Hamilton, a movement of adult educators and community organizers who work towards decolonization and social change on Turtle Island.
Keywords: global environmental and climate mitigation governance, sustainable development, orientalist imaginaries, traditional sustainable knowledges