Romy Opperman is a feminist philosopher bridging critical philosophy of race, environmental philosophy, and critical theory. Her research focuses on Black ecologies, Black feminism, Africana, and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist philosophies to understand ecological violence and to envision liberated climate futures. Romy is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is currently completing her first book manuscript Ecological Autonomy: Reimagining Environmental Racism with Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter.

Ecological Autonomy argues for the need to conceptualize racism and ecology beyond justice framings. Building on Fanon’s and Wynter’s sociogenic approaches, Romy argues that we should understand racism and ecology as co-constitutive, that is, in terms of racist environments. Crucially, racist environments differentially constrict, devalue, capture, and violently eradicate some ecologies and modes of socioecological relation; ecological autonomy refers to the capacity to determine or maintain socioecological relations, systems of value, and knowledge, as well the ways this capacity grounds and enables liberation struggles and freedom dreams.

At GIDEST, Romy will focus on the chapter “Irradiated Autonomy: Between Fanon and Wynter,” in which she considers the constitution of autonomous collectivities within and across racist environments of toxicity, irradiation, and exhaustion. The chapter illuminates the limits and tensions within and between Fanon and Wynter by thinking with multiple fronts in what Lou Cornum calls the “irradiated international.” Romy is especially interested in how ecological-psychic-somatic entanglement demands diachronic, intergenerational, and situated analyses informed by reproductive and disability justice.