The Humans of HISB 

From Research To Action: Peggy Spitzer on female-driven climate activism on a global scale – An Interview

Peggy Spitzer, a 2021-2022 HISB Faculty Fellow, sat down for a short interview with CAS IDEA Grad  Jesus Jimenez Valdes, a Ph.D student in the SBU Hispanic Languages and Literature Department, to talk about her journey from academic scholar to the co-founder of her NGO Climate Knowledge Collective (CK Collective) which she formed in 2024 “to document innovative, locally-led, women-centered climate change projects around the world”. As a Faculty Fellow, she did substantial work on her book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South: The Path Toward Environmental Social Justice, a culmination of research conducted between 2016-2023, and in part, inspiration for CK Collective.

Jimenez Valdes: What led you to focus your research on the intersection of female leadership, climate change, and environmental equity?

Spitzer: We could say that it all started at the East-West Center in Hawaii, where I went as a China scholar. In 2016, Nancy Lewis Davis, the research director, gave me a publication called Roots for the Future, sparking my interest in linking female leadership, climate change, and environmental equity. At Stony Brook in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, since 2012, I had been teaching a course, Women in U.S-Asian Relations, but I hadn’t tied women’s leadership to the environment until I went to Hawaii. Later, at the annual United Nations climate change conference (COP), I became a judge for the Women and Gender Constituency’s project awards on women-led climate solutions. Also, social entrepreneur Trupti Jain invited me and my student at the time, Jamie Sommer, to Gujarat, India to interview smallholder farmers who had been devastated by successive periods of floods and droughts.  They were in the process of learning about Trupti’s women-led irrigation technology.  Upon returning to the US, Jamie and I used our interviews to create a digital collection through Stony Brook University Libraries, called Mirroring Hope.  And so It began with understanding Asia’s climate challenges and women’s roles via the East-West Center.

Jimenez Valdes: All those projects -and specifically this very last one- were running parallel to the fellowship you had at the Humanities Institute?

Spitzer: That was before the fellowship. Actually, those were the experiences that led me to apply for the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB) Faculty Fellowship, which I luckily got, to write a book.. This is interesting: back then, HISB was closed due to COVID, and I remember meeting my cohort fellows, Shirley Lim and Kristina Lucenko, at my place for dinners throughout the year. Shirley was working on Anna May Wong’s biography, and Kristina on 1600s British women writers. Our conversations definitely shaped my work. For example, I moved away from women’s trauma memories—inspired by former HISB director Anne Kaplan—to the way women adapted to weather-related disasters in the Global South.  HISB was crucial; since then my book also asks, “What can we do from here?”

Jimenez Valdes: You mentioned focusing on practices, and how they helped reframe your theoretical approach. Can you give specific examples? You mentioned trauma, for example—any other approaches they helped you develop?

Spitzer: Yes, absolutely. I shifted from trauma studies to reflexive feminist oral history methodologies. I’d done oral histories at the Library of Congress—and typically it’s a situation of  “you ask, I answer.” But reflexive feminist methodologies insist on two-way exchanges “What are the perspectives of the interviewer and the interviewee—a shared dialogue. That’s what I adopted, refined through HISB discussions.

Jimenez Valdes: Why do we need oral histories to represent women in the Global South?

Spitzer: They show how people globally solve problems—and we often miss that. Oral histories reveal women tackling enormous challenges and building community. In the U.S., we’re individualistic, uniting only in crises; and these stories highlight a communitarian approach we often lack.

Jimenez Valdes: What inspired the CK Collective, which ties into collecting oral histories, and how has it connected your academic work to broader social impact?

Spitzer: I didn’t plan to create the CK Collective while writing the book. But several colleagues and I  felt that transdisciplinary work was needed. For example, in an SBU102 course that CKC teaches,  we worked with Chilean ecofeminists to link art and science.  With Chilean weavers, we studied weaving from oral histories—starting under Pinochet, now climate-focused. Our interns, Lulya and Naja (from the University of St. Thomas) are analyzing all the oral histories, boosting us. This summer, CKC team members, Karina Yager, Susan Hinley, and Jamie Sommer will go to the Cloud Forest in Guatemala to interview more women leaders and learn about ancient weaving practices and the effects of climate change.   It ties my scholarship to public impact, amplifying unheard voices.

Jimenez Valdes: Congrats on that project—it sounds fascinating!

Spitzer: Thanks! The CK Collective keeps these oral histories alive, connecting academia to social good. 

Peggy Spitzer is a research professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University and President of the non-profit, Climate Knowledge Collective. She has co-authored several research studies, two of which won awards, on the social and cultural aspects of female empowerment and climate change. In addition, Peg served as a program consultant for the Kluge Center for International Scholars (Library of Congress), Freer and Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the East-West Center. Her book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South: The Path Toward Environmental Social Justice, was published by Emerald Press in 2023.