Journal articles on the topic 'Critical ecological feminism'

This paper attempts a reading of Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance (1997) and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) envision insights from recent developments in eco-criticism and eco-feminism. Through Gender theory eco-feminism substantiates the silence of women in Linden Hills. Eco-criticism is a form of literary criticism based on ecological perspectives. It investigates the relation between human and the natural world in literature, such as the way in which environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes towards nature are presented and analyzed. One of the main goals of eco-criticism concerns the environment and attitudes towards nature and ecological aspects. This form of criticism has gained a lot of attention during recent years (approximately since 2000) due to greater social emphasis on environmental destruction as a result of increased technology. It is hence a way of analyzing and interpreting literary texts. Eco critics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of “Place” should be a distinctive category, gender or race. By examining the eco critical discourse in A Fine Balance, the paper posits that Mistry’s vision of development in India is predicated on the conditions of sustainability. The Ecological Feminism is an interdisciplinary movement which interrogates the new ways of thought process concerning natural world, diplomacy, and mysticism. Eco-feminist speculation has exacting and important association between females and natural world. Eco-feminism understands the suppression of women and their mistreatment in phrases of the subjugation and operation of the environment. Naylor discusses gender conditioned with eco-feminism perspectives. She scrutinizes United States as a “Place”, in relation to race of Linden Hills. The postcolonial feminist theory contends that through novel, A Fine Balance comparing with Linden Hills, Mistry interrogate the difficulties of maintaining natural and human diversity in the contemporary economic and social development in the Indian subcontinent. The aspects of paper are tailoring sustainability, ecology, eco - feminism and environment, urbanization and modernization, creation of ecological imbalance and the use of nature ‘as an end to all means’.

Early in the development of ecofeminist literary criticism, white feminists borrowed shallowly and unethically from Indigenous cultures. Using that underinformed discourse to interpret Native American women’s literature resulted in idealizing and silencing Indigenous women’s voices and concerns. Native American feminist literary critics have also asserted that a well-informed, inclusive “tribal-feminism” or Indigenous-feminist critical approach can be appropriate and productive, in that it focuses on unique and shared imbalances created by white patriarchal colonization, thinking, and ways of being that affect Indigenous and non-Indigenous women and cultures and the environment. In her third novel, Gardens in the Dunes, Leslie Marmon Silko interweaves an ecological critique of white imperialist botanical exploitation of landscapes and Indigenous peoples globally with both a celebration of Native American relationships to the land and Indigenous women’s resourceful resistance and an ecofeminist reclamation of European pagan/Great Goddess iconography, sacred landscapes, and white feminist autonomy. Expanding on earlier Indigenous-feminist readings, this ecofeminist analysis looks at a key trope in Gardens, the Ghost Dance, an environmentally and ancestrally focused nineteenth-century sacred resistance and reclamation rite. Silko’s is a late-twentieth-century literary adaptation/enactment in what is the continuing r/evolution of the Ghost Dance, a dynamic figure in Native American literature and culture.

The serious ecological crises like air pollution, acid precipitation, global warming, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity have engulfed our planet earth. Ecocriticism became very much acclaimed critical approach in the 1980’s after Feminism and Post-colonialism, and developed, with attention from scholars of various fields, in different countries into a separate subject. In the application of Ecocriticism to the study of all forms of literary works it shows the ideas and thoughts that prove helpful in dealing with the relationshipbetween man and nature, and also contribute to the cause of environmental preservation.

The present article is concerned with the nexus of masculinities and environment. The authors present their critical analyses of two configurations of masculinities the authors refer to as ‘industrial/breadwinner’ and ‘ecomodern’ masculinities that dominate politics worldwide. The authors stated their opinion on the fact that the first two configurations of masculinities are acutely but distinctly in conflict with the wellbeing of the planet. The paper presents an empirical and theoretical analysis of ‘ecological masculinities’, which considers the insights and limitations of masculinities studies, deep ecology, ecological feminism and feminist care theory. In this article, the authors focus their attention on the necessity of ecologisation of masculinities as well as on the need for men and masculinities to ‘ecologise’ relationally and create more caring encounters with self and others. In support of the need in a transition from hegemonisation to ecologisation, necessary configurations beyond the constraints of industrial/breadwinner and ecomodern masculinities are presented. The authors also argue that the potential to expose and resolve the anthropocentric discord between Earth, others and human beings is possible within the very constructs of manhood. The notion of ecological masculinities suggested in the article is a constructive response to the roles of men and masculine identities in the Anthropocene. The exit politics central to the notion of ecological masculinities represent a theoretical framework and plurality of practices reflective of a masculine ecologisation process. The authors encourage scholarly masculinities inquiries and practices towards broader, deeper and wider care for the ‘glocal’ (global and local) commons.

AbstractThe analysis presented here focuses on the way the antithesis between the global and the local is approached from a literary point of view in the contemporary Indian context. Assuming an ecocritical perspective, it reinterprets literature on ecological themes as a tool to negotiate some spaces of autonomy from hegemonic models imposed by globalization on an economic, technological and cultural level. Global plans often collide with local ecosystems, upsetting their pre-existent equilibrium and always more frequently producing antagonism, resistance and overt conflicts. The claim for the management of local resources and the safeguard of traditional lore become a response to the “allegedly value-neutral global market” (Eaton / Lorentzen (eds.) (2003): Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 4). Filtering the discussion through an ecofeminist critique, it is possible to find a connection between the abuse of power that underlies human oppression and the exploitation of the environment. Women and nature are, in fact, connected in the dominant masculine discourse by the rhetoric of submission, which is harmful to both of them (Zimmerman, et al. (ed.) (1993): Environmental Philosophy: from Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.; Warren / Cheney. (1991): “Ecological Feminism and Ecosystem Ecology”. Hypatia 6/1 Ecological Feminism: 179–197.). As an example of resistance strategy to these dynamics and a means to give voice to women through literature, this article proposes a critical reading of the novel Betvā bahtī rahī by Maitreyī Puṣpā (“The Betvā River was flowing”).

The eco-critical film, Seorang Kambing (Tunggung Banjaransari, 2016), is part of eco-cinema, which mainly talks about problems of water crisis throughout its narrative. Eco-cinema has not only audio-visual presentations regarding environmental issues, but also functionalizes aesthetic choices, which could encourage viewers to have mindful and critical awareness of ecological problems. This article is aimed to examine how the film narrative of Seorang Kambing reproduces gender problems around the issue of water crisis. This article uses Stella Bruzzi’s (2013) concept of masculine aethetics in the cinema and the approach of eco-feminism, which critically reveals the connections between the oppressions of the nature and those toward women. By applying narrative analysis, which is presented by Helen Fulton (2005), this article reveals that masculine aethetics are functionalized predominantly in the film to narrate the problems of water crisis. Paradoxically, Seorang Kambing, as an intended eco-critical film, seems to simply overlook the significant roles of women around the issue of water crisis. In addition, the film reproduces the exclusion of women from the discourse of water crisis.

Abstract The ever-increasing environmental crises and the subsequent decay of the earth is a veritable call for concern which has stimulated man’s consciousness vis-à-vis his own very existence and his natural surroundings. There is therefore, the need for continuous resistance against the socio-cultural, political and economic manoeuvres that place man and his environment at extreme ends. This paper, therefore, focuses on the study of Bole Butake’s play: Lake God. It adopts both the eco-critical and eco-feminist approaches and hypothesizes that Butake’s depiction of a panoply of issues that centre around the female body and the land foreshadow a quest to overcome ecological and female oppression in order to render the land a more fertile ground for sustainable development and female empowerment. The paper contends that Butake’s play resonates a feminist self-consciousness which is suggestive of the need to seek alternative means of combating land exploitation in order to sustain a symbiotic relationship between man and his eco-space. In reading Butake’s work from an eco-feminist perspective, this paper intends to show that the characters he creates and the milieu in which they are positioned place the woman in a precarious state. Drawing therefore, from the global tenets of eco-feminism which posit that the woman and nature are related based on their history of domination and exploitation, this paper intends to revisit the eco-space and female agency in Butake’s work to postulate that the woman has the power to preserve the land and to create a healthy and conducive atmosphere. The paper, thus, exemplifies the author’s admiration for one’s native land which must be treasured and protected.

Nancy Fraser is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent critical theorists of our time and is highly regarded for her work on feminism and capitalism. In this interview, she sets out the new conceptions of capitalism, crisis, and critique that she has been developing since her 2014 article “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” She begins by presenting an original conception of capitalism as an “institutionalized social order,” which includes not only its economic features, but also its social, ecological, and political background conditions of possibility. After defining the normative foundations of capitalism and the corresponding boundary struggles to which it gives rise, she then explores the multiple crises it is currently experiencing. Inspired by Marx’s tripartite critique, she concludes by proposing a new multi-stranded critique of capitalism, which combines a functionalist critique of capitalism’s tendencies to crisis with a normative critique of domination and a political critique of unfreedom.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

The emerging set of discourses around women, nature, and the environment can be identified with the umbrella term environmental or ecological feminisms. In developing a geographical approach to environmental issues, a critical engagement with the questions raised by environmental feminisms is suggested. After a brief introduction to the principles of environmental feminisms for a geographical audience, three broad fields for future geographical work are outlined, namely: nature, culture, and gender; gendered relations of global development and environments; and gendered landscapes and identities. In particular it is argued that feminist and cultural geographical writing provides a critical opening for the further development of environmental feminist approaches.

The scale and ubiquity of global industrialized mining and its proportionately negative impact on human rights and the environment is well documented. These costly externalities, taken in the context of increasing demand for mined materials in technical applications such as mobile phones and other devices seen as essential to contemporary commerce and communication, focalize a range of contentious issues and complexities. This article argues that mining, as an instance of instrumentalism in the human–earth relationship and in many human–human relations, exposes the reason/nature dualism underlying western ontological assumptions. Key features of dualism are described and implicated for their role in the oppression and exploitation of both human and non-human Others. A map drawn from critical ecological feminism outlining an escape route out of dualism is unfolded and brought together with the onto-ethico-epistemology of agential realism in an effort to discover possibilities for a new western social imaginary of non-dualism. The art of Lee Harrop featuring engraved core samples from mining exploration is deployed as a productive site for thinking through non-dualising implications arising from science and new materialisms.

The so-called Anthropocene debate has been characterized by an androcentric gaze, despite the fact that feminist perspectives such as ecofeminisms or new materialist feminisms have been making contributions on ecological and planetary sustainability for years. This article explores the possible contributions that Feminist Peace Research can make to this debate, thus including a critical analysis on conflicts and militarism on the debates regarding the sustainability of life on the planet.

The world’s centre of gravity is changing, from the North Atlantic to Eastern Asia. As world centres of knowledge have correlated historically with world centres of power, this ongoing geopolitical change is likely to bring changes also to the global map of cognition. Knowledge and power are intrinsically related, knowledge is power, it is based on power, and it produces instruments of power. Moreover, the vistas of social scientists and scholars are always circumscribed by the power relations of the social world they are studying. A way of looking into this is to analyse the concepts and the narratives they use and produce. What features do they highlight, and what do they hide? Cognitive change is driven by two kinds of change, change (i.e. new discovery) of evidence, and change of power. On a macro scale, the major forces of power change bearing upon cognitive change have been social mobilizations, for example, of classes, women, and ethnic groups, the rise and decline of states, and, third, economic or ecological crises disrupting the functioning of existing powers. Indigenization and de-Westernization are different programmes. The former is synonymous with nativization and rooting in the particular culture of a population, whereas the latter may be, and often is, an emancipation from Western cultural domination in the name of another universalistic culture. De-Westernization is inherently confrontational, whereas indigenization may range from supplementary to isolationist. Academic indigenization and de-Westernization have in their cognitive challenges similarities with contemporary critical identity movements, such as feminism and ethnic movements. The cognitive challenges mounted by both types of currents proceed across four levels of cognitive depths, claiming canon inclusion of certain thinkers and role models, questioning and rejection of prevailing social narratives, practising new forms of knowledge production, and fourth epistemological or meta-sociological reflections on the old and the new knowledge paradigms. Indigenization should be treated as a limited supplementary project, whereas de-Westernization is likely to advance. It should be an opening of global horizons, not a closure. Pluralism of critique, challenge, and search for other, better ways are decisive for the development of knowledge.

This research discusses the efforts of women in the community as a form of environmental culture in responding to the climate change crisis. The arrogance issue of patriarchal reason has distorted human ability to recognize the main problem of environmental damage. Humans are trapped in the illusion of the domination of reason which seeks to control nature as non-humans. As a result of this arrogance of reason, culture is formed hierarchically dominating nature (non-humans). We offer a change in cultural perspective through the environmental culture raised by Val Plumwood. This culture with an ecological and caring perspective is a form of the feminist ecological thought movement. We use the method of analyzing feminist issues through feminist knowledge standpoints that interact with ecological research methods. We collect data through various media with a focus on telling the experiences of women in dealing with environmental problems. Our analysis comes to the conclusion that concrete initiatives and actions are needed that involve all ecological elements as a form of solidarity. In this way, we no longer glorify humans as the rulers of reason, but rather create critical and creative communities in realizing an environmental culture.

Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies.Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance

A critical review is made of feminist analyses of wife assault postulating that patriarchy is a direct cause of wife assault. Data are reviewed from a variety of studies indicating that (a) lesbian battering is more frequent than heterosexual battering, (b) no direct relationship exists between power and violence within couples, and (c) no direct relationship exists between structural patriarchy and wife assault It is concluded that patriarchy must interact with psychological variables in order to account for the great variation in power-violence data. It is suggested that some forms of psychopathology may lead to some men adopting patriarchal ideology to justify and rationalize their own pathology.

This conversation is part of a special issue on “Critical Nutrition” in which multiple authors weigh in on various themes related to the origins, character, and consequences of contemporary American nutrition discourses and practices, as well as how nutrition might be known and done differently. In this section, authors reflect on the limits of standard nutrition in understanding the relationship between food and human health. They also focus on how nutrition practitioners are or could be creating different practices for how nutritional information is made available, shared, and absorbed. Among the different frameworks under discussion are individualized nutrition, ecological nutrition, critical dietary literacy, feminist nutrition, and technologies of humility.

This paper seeks to provide an ecofeminist and queer critique of Israeli aggression towards and occupation of Palestine in three parts. Firstly, providing a critical analysis of tropes surrounding the creation of the Israel including early policies relating to land and afforestation. Secondly, by revealing how these tropes about the founding of Israel expose racist understandings about the supposed nature of Palestinians and Arabs (as backwards, queered and so on) and Thirdly, how these projections in the two previous sections about Israeli ingenuity and the supposed natural inferiority of Palestinians and Arabs informs current ecological mal/development in Israel and Palestine.

In this article, I utilize a political ecology of the body (PEB) approach to analyze women's transnational migration and their experiences with 'food insecurity.' I situate this analysis within a tradition of feminist political ecology, seeking to advance a 'postcolonial intersectionality' that is attentive to gender, race, and class as axes of power and difference, and also to markers of citizenship or lack thereof, including 'illegality.' I argue that the ideologies behind these axes of power obscure the very social processes in which power is constituted, those that allow an unevenness to ecological suffering, specifically at the locus of the migrant women's body. I suggest that by applying a PEB framing to analyze the personally necessary activities of eating and feeding, we are able to elucidate material and health disparities characterizing transborder ecologies. Thus, I delineate the biopolitics of 'food insecurity': a contest over nutritional resources in which migrant bodies are subjected to the disciplining techniques of neoliberal capitalism, as migrants also subvert the conditions of this environment through embodied modes of collective resistance.Keywords: political ecology of the body, feminist political ecology, intersectionality, illegal migration, food insecurity, biopolitics

Editor’s note: this article is a summary of the Keynote at the Section Annual Conference Transpersonal Activism on 12 September 2021.Despite its designation as the ‘Fourth Force,’ Transpersonal Psychology often occupies a peripheral and precarious place within mainstream Psychological approaches. Its historic focus on mystical/spiritual and non-ordinary states of consciousness, coupled with its continued emphasis on subjective and experiential inquiry, have often led to it being excluded in favour of more materialist, positivistic paradigms that currently dominate the discipline. Rather than attempt to simply adapt and assimilate into more mainstream, conventional forms of Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology has a unique opportunity to actively embrace its otherness and outsider status; to pursue authentic interdisciplinary encounters and pioneer more inclusive and radical approaches to research methods. In contemporary Humanistic and Engaged expressions of Eastern Wisdom Traditions (specifically Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism) one may observe the increasing emphasis on ecological awareness, recovery of the Divine Feminine and more spiritually informed approaches to social justice. To avoid accusations of remoteness, solipsism and spiritual bypassing, Transpersonal Psychologists also need to better attend and creatively respond to prevailing political and socioeconomic conditions. In this keynote I will demonstrate how Transpersonal Psychology has at its heart, always constituted a critical/radical approach to Psychology and still retains the capacity to reinvigorate, re-enchant, transform and transcend.

In the past decade, multiple compounding crises ‐ ecological, racial injustices, ‘care crises’ and multiple recent crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic ‐ have reinforced the powerful role of critical and social policy researchers to push back against ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, and a post-truth era that denigrates science and evidence-based research. These new realities can pose challenges for social scientists who work within relational, ontological, non-representational, new materialist, performative, decolonising, or ecological ‘turns’ in social theory and epistemologies. This article’s overarching question is: How does one work within non-representational research paradigms while also attempting to hold onto representational, authoritative and convincing versions of truth, evidence, facts and data? Informed by my research on feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code’s 40-year trajectory of writing about knowledge making and ecological social imaginaries, I navigate these dilemmas by calling on an unexpected ally to family sociology and family policy: the late American environmentalist Rachel Carson. Extending Code’s case study of Carson, I argue for an approach that combines (1) ecological relational ontologies, (2) the ethics and politics of knowledge making, (3) crossing social imaginaries of knowledge making and (4) a reconfigured view of knowledge makers as working towards just and cohabitable worlds.

Abstract This chapter reviews four books published in 2018 which are not readily categorized as works in ‘modern European philosophy’: Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancloğlu, and Dalia Gebrial’s edited volume Decolonising the University, Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%, and Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm. Yet their uneasy relationship to this philosophy is precisely the reason they constitute a significant contribution to it. The philosophical originality and critical purchase of these books proceed from the fact that each is a singular case of philosophy’s dependence on ‘non-philosophy’; each exposes the impossibility of viewing philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In particular, they are a timely reminder that the best political philosophy is produced through actually existing social movements to change (which ecologically now means simply saving) the world. The chapter is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Decolonizing Philosophy: Decolonising the University; 3. Anti-Post-Politics: For a Left Populism; 4. Anti-Post-Marxism: Feminism for the 99%; 5. Anti-Postmodernism: The Progress of This Storm; 6. Conclusion.

At the turn of the 21st century, an historical moment of rapid earth system change and environmental crisis in an era labelled by some scholars as the Anthropocene (the age of humans), the need for environmental education is perhaps greater than ever; but, as I argued 27 years ago, not just any environmental education will do. As the world confronts increasingly complex issues of rising poverty, escalating conflict, and ecological degradation, it matters what we mean by ‘the environment’, and it matters what educational practices we engage. Too often, environmental education has adopted the persistent and problematic ‘human versus nature’ binary in Western thinking, a conceptual legacy that leads to false dichotomies separating problems considered more ‘social’ from those classified as more ‘environmental’. Over the past 3 decades, the field of environmental education has expanded globally, benefitting from the path-breaking analyses of environmental justice studies, feminist political ecology, and the environmental humanities, all transdisciplinary fields that offer environmental education a critical frame for understanding the dynamic ‘social nature’ of human and environment connections and interdependencies. Yet, the current discourse of the Anthropocene reengages these oppressive dichotomies. To rethink and transform this re-splitting trend, I envision the flourishing of a robust, socially critical environmental education grounded in feminist analyses, environmental justice and decolonial theories, and engaged in embodied, lively action research collaborations supporting more sustainable and resilient communities.

Abstract In this article, the authors discuss selected examples of post-anthropocentric art, which—as they show—is associated with human sensitivity, care, empathy, and the capacity for compassion. Czakon and Michna present artistic creations that serve as examples of art that respond efficiently and quickly to the pressing problems of the contemporary world. This post-anthropocentric art, as they call it, critically reacts to major ecological and social problems of today. For this purpose, in the first and second part of the essay, they briefly characterize the basic differences between traditional, anthropocentric art and contemporary post-anthropocentric art, which has been broadly investigated in, among others, the framework of feminist philosophy and women’s studies. Czakon and Michna focus on such fundamental aesthetics concepts as fine arts and the canon thereof, aesthetic pleasure, and the artist of genius, as well as the categories of beauty and the sublime and the ideal of contemplative viewing of art. Then they present and describe selected examples of artworks that reveal their critical potential by contributing to ecological changes in the contemporary world.

The idea of ‘arts of vulnerability’ (AoV) reclaims the fact of being inherently open (never sealed) and becomes a tool to navigate such a lack of closure. It is art because it comes from art practice, and it is of vulnerability because it comes from materials that are vulnerable and defy control. The idea is rooted in bioart practice understood as artistic research and read through feminist and queer studies about embodiment and ecology. This article traces how the artwork series Wombs contributed to the development of the idea. AoV is a way of understanding art practice, yet it becomes an ethical and intellectual tool that pays attention (and tribute) to more-than-human ethics and aesthetics. It may thus contribute to a critical discussion of today’s surging ecological complexity.

Abstract. The Anthropocene reorients the agrarian question as an ecological question of planetary scale. Rather than resolving the inherent tension between political economy and the biophysical environment by moving political ecology closer to the natural sciences, we propose an active engagement with impulses from the environmental humanities and anthropological engagements with alternative ontologies. The relational political ecology of agriculture that we outline in this article draws on feminist science studies, multispecies ethnography, new materialism and critical geography. We show the relevance of a relational approach to agriculture as a natureculture entanglement by reviewing three conceptualisations of land in political ecology in relation to our anthropological research in South India (Münster) and geographical research in Northern Pakistan (Poerting). Notions of land as resource, land as soil and land as landscape respectively exemplify shifts in theoretical and political engagements with agriculture in the Anthropocene. A relational political ecology of agriculture incorporates these theoretical sensibilities and brings them in conversation with ontological politics of agro-ecological movements who respond to the variegated crises of the anthropocene. We suggest a perspective on agrarian landscape assemblages as coproduced by histories of capitalist transformations and the (affective) relations between humans, other species and materials.

Abstract This essay is concerned with tracing the political dimensions of the ‘anomaly’ – in a period when the structuring conditions that the term refers to emerge rather as the ‘new normal’, even as historical continuities come to light and reveal that little is altogether new. We can see this in debates on whether contemporary art is exceptional or exemplary in a political economy characterised by the precarity of labour and life amidst relentless commodification. In this light, the article attends to the epistemic ‘economies’ of the rule and the exception, in order to foreground debates over value production in Marxist feminist and ecological theories of reproductive labour, with some attention as well to critical theories of race. This is an attempt to ground the status of the anomalous as a key means for the politics of artistic work and labour in the present.

Plants perform their own interests and purposes. Plants perform in ways that afford and invite specific human experiences. Plants also perform complex biopolitical roles. With these multivalent understandings of plant performance in mind, this introduction to the “Plant Performance” issue of Performance Philosophy outlines the editors’ broadly feminist approach to the challenges facing scholars and artists in the field of Critical Plant Studies. We present these challenges, including colonisation and decolonisation, botanical aesthetics and its vegetal limits, instrumentality and vegetal respect, and phytopolitics and plant liveliness, as provocations for scholars and artists grappling with ecological, political and creative human relations with the vegetal world. The introduction, alongside the eight essays included in the issue, considers how thinking with plant performance might create conditions for a more contextual, critical, reflexive, nuanced, and/or urgent understanding of plant-human relationships, both historically and in the current moment. In addition to considering questions of plant performative agency, the issue foregrounds the politico-aesthetic conditions in which plant performances cannot help but occur. It details how specific works of performance art intervene in these conditions, and it contributes to the development of a more global and multiply-situated network of performative, critical plant knowledges, relations, and practices.

Within the growing body of research on creative arts practices in community settings and mental health and well-being, the craft of jewellery-making has not featured strongly, and understanding from contextual, critical sociological perspectives has not been widely developed. This article reports on ethnographic research undertaken with an older women’s adult community learning (ACL) jewellery-making group, using theories of ecological and relational agency and insights from feminist theorizing to help elucidate its social, creative, educational and mental health and well-being-related generative processes. Findings are presented along two main, interrelated themes: creative agency and shared learning, and the social generativity of the group. The focus is on the transgressive, resistive and expansive aspects of the group’s interactions within the wider socio-economic, sociopolitical and cultural context of the women’s lives. Implications for enacting the mental health and well-being agenda in ACL are discussed.

This paper proposes “making refuge” as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, a guiding ethos and praxis, for the engaged Buddhist aspiration of responding to the social, political, economic, and planetary crises facing the world. Making refuge is conceived as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. The paper will explain the rationale for making refuge by connecting the dharmic understanding of dukkha with feminist conceptualizations of the body and vulnerability. This will chart some theoretical and methodological pathways for engaged Buddhism to further its liberatory aspirations in reciprocity with emergent movements in radical critical theory, contemplative studies, and social and ecological activism. The paper will also examine the effects of white supremacy in U.S. Buddhism through the framework of making refuge. This will demonstrate how political healing and restorative justice might be cultivated through a dispositional ethics that pays appropriate attention to the vulnerabilities facing oppressed people.

AbstractIn the late 1970s, Carden Wallace was at the beginning of her lifelong exploration of the Great Barrier Reef — and indeed, reefs all over the world. For Wallace, who is now Emeritus Principal Scientist at Queensland Museum, the beginning of her Reef career coincided with the emergence of both feminist and environmental movements that meant her personal and professional lives would be entwined with a changing social, cultural and political milieu. In this article, we couple the story of Wallace’s personal life and her arrival in coral science to identify the Reef as a gendered space ripe to explore both feminist and conservation politics. The article is part of a broader Women of the Reef project that supports a history of women’s contribution to the care and conservation of the Reef since the 1960s. In amplifying the role of women in the story of the Reef, we find hope in the richness of detail offered by oral history to illuminate the ways discourse on the Reef and its women sits at the intersection of biography, culture, politics and place. In these stories, we recognise women’s participation and leadership as critical to past challenges, and to current and future climate change action. By retelling modern Reef history through the experiences and achievements of women, we can develop new understandings of the Reef that disrupt the existing dominance of patriarchal and Western systems of knowledge and power that have led us to the brink of ecological collapse.

The subject of my paper is the dynamic and transformational relations between aesthetics and art from 1919 to 2019. The first problem to be discussed will be the relationship between art and politics at the Bauhaus and art institutes of the Soviet avant-garde. Next, I will point to differences in Marxist concepts of socialist realism and critical theory on modern culture and art. I will analyse the relationship between the concept of the autonomy of art, especially painting and minimal art. A comparison will be derived between anti-art (Dada, NEO-Dada) and anti-philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan). I will highlight approaches from analytical meta-aesthetics to the interpretation of Duchamp's readymade, deriving a theory of art in conceptual art. Special attention will be paid to the "theoretical conflicts" between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as poststructuralism. I will conclude my discussion by identifying the "aesthetic condition" in relation to "contemporary art" (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, and appropriative art). The aim of my discussion will be to highlight the character of modern and contemporary aesthetics in relation to art theory, by way of diagrammatic reflection on the binaries, differences, and reconstructions of dialectics.

The article examines critique in relation to current theories pursued and addressed in contemporary art and activism. The conception of a “partaking critique” seeks to conceive critique beyond universalising abstractions and totalising gestures. By reformulating critique as a partaking practice, we set ourselves in relation to the current demands and urgencies of a world that must confront the challenges of climate change, migration flows, inequalities between the global north and south, and the mistrust of democracy. We find it important that critique results not merely in a judging and condemning analysis and the division between correct and false. A “partaking critique” deals with historical conditions and traditional formulations of critique. Critique as a partaking practice is situated, local, transversal, and reparative, and thus mobilises dispositions to act in a panorama of neo-liberal mechanisms of paralysis and paranoia. We developed our understanding of critique based on our engagement with critical examples at the crossroads of artistic and activist practices, such as Colectivo Situaciones, which in the scope of this article can only be briefly presented. We queried, shifted and transformed the concept of critique employing discourse analysis and a close reading of critical (queer)feminist concepts of the late 1980s. The perspectives taken by Donna Haraway and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick allow us to place the focus not on negative critique but on instituent and transversal processes, and thus on rethinking the transformative potentials of ethico-aesthetic practices. The current socio-political and ecological challenges require a thinking that transverses and queers traditional valorisations of critique: we do not offer a universal, objective and strong theory, but instead favour categories of partiality, situatedness and responsibility. Critique as a practice of partaking is communicated not as the judgement of a critical subject, but in, through and with instituent processes as well as in materialities.

Abstract This article offers an account of “toxic infrastructures” as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the “corporate dump” of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a “garbage arcadia” compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

The BLOD project aims to create multivocal cinematic experiences through embodied practices. The research explores relation- building through a feminist methodology of creating gaps and friction – between audience, story, time, matter, and co-creators. The project asks, how to tell multifaceted, non-exploitive stories of womb-related states of life and death, rarely depicted in cinema? And how to disturb film industry hierarchies through a collaborative practice that maintains individual artistic integrity and promotes collective authorship? The BLOD method is articulated as a Manifesto, written to accommodate a multitude of contents, forms, and modes of collaboration, while demanding cross-disciplinarity, honesty and risk-taking. The method is non-linear, looping, and embedded in the manifestations of the research: films, performances, presentations, etc. Through this paper, different aspects of the BLOD method are tossed around in relation to BLOD research activities; making cinematic building blocks that allow and induce multiplicity, improvisation, and fluidity of form; sharing personal experiences through fictionalized documentary processes; dealing with ethics in interpersonal and ecological relations. The paper proposes that critical reflection and vulnerability are integral to film production and offers this case study as an example for method development in other research projects or films – especially ones that sprawl, tangle, and defy categorization by field or discipline.

Urban refugees face several challenges which affect their emotional, social, and psychological well-being. This study utilised a quantitative cross-sectional design. The study assessed the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and psychological distress from a gender perspective among Rwandan refugees in Lusaka, Zambia. Two hundred and sixty-seven refugees between 18 and 65(M=33.99 years) participated in the study. The sample comprised men (47.9%) and women (52.1%) who were selected from Lusaka townships using purposive and convenience sampling techniques. SES was measured by assessing participants’ educational attainment, occupational status or employment, income, and financial support, whereas subjective psychological distress was evaluated using the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28). Framed within the feminist and the ecological systems perspectives, the study established an association between SES and psychological distress. The proportions of female participants in the lower education and unemployment categories and lower-income bracket were considerably higher than males in the same category. Similarly, the study revealed that the proportion of females (27%) with severe depression was higher than males (19%). However, the gender difference was negligible with other subscales such as the somatic symptoms, anxiety and insomnia, and social dysfunction. Bivariate associations revealed well-established gender differences, where women with low education and financial support reported higher levels of psychological distress. Multivariate analysis revealed that employment predicted a lower level of psychological distress in both men and women. The findings highlight that refugees’ access to employment is an essential factor in determining psychological well-being. Well-defined intervention strategies by government and humanitarian bodies are critical and should aim to empower refugees towards easy access to formal and informal labour market opportunities.

Livelihoods in rural communities have become increasingly complex due to rapidly changing socio-economic and environmental forces, with differing impacts on and responses by female and male youth. This study contributes to feminist political ecology through an explicit focus on youth and an examination of the intersections of age and gender in educational choices, livelihood systems, and human–environment interactions. We undertake double exposures analysis to explore female and male youths’ livelihood-related decision-making in Rayón, a semi-arid rural community in Northwest Mexico, undergoing global environmental change and globalization-related shifts in agriculture, climate, water, and socio-economic conditions. Global environmental change exacerbates an already fragile, local ecological context. A focus on gender issues among youth in three age categories (14–15, 16–19, and youth in their 20s) with respect to their decision-making concerning the future is critical to gaining a better understanding of the roles women and men will play in linked agricultural and non-agricultural, rural to urban livelihood systems. Agricultural employment increasingly includes global agribusiness where local youth compete with people from other areas. Access to employment, education, as well as water and land resources varied by gender, age, and social class, and played significant roles in livelihood diversification and migration decisions and outcomes. Mothers’ access to government assistance for their natural resource-based livelihoods positively impacted daughters’ opportunities. Educational curricula failed to link environmental change with local livelihoods and to prepare students for urban careers. This study offers insights related to female and male youths’ needs associated with environmental education, technology access, job training, and child and sibling care in order for them to more successfully confront the future across village, town, and city spaces.

Full TextIn contemporary, North American society, what it means to be ‘human’ is often taken for granted; in other words, ‘humanness’ is usually accepted as a readily knowable, uncomplicated and stable aspect of social reality. Ivone Gebara argues that because we believe that we already know the meaning of ‘humanness,’ reflecting on this notion often appears to be of little interest, need or value. “Since we imagine that everyone already knows what a [‘human’] is, we might have the feeling that we are wasting our time on notions that are already familiar, and that we ought to be seeking solutions to the urgent problems that [currently] face us” (Gebara, 1999: 67). Like Gebara, I argue that the concept of ‘human,’ is not ‘natural,’ stable or straightforward, rather it is a culturally-specific and historical invention, one intimately implicated within contemporary, environmental problems. In other words, although the category of human is often understood as readily comprehensible and fundamentally elevated above, and detached from, nature and ‘more-thanhuman’I beings, I maintain that the human subject is positioned within what I will term ‘the web of life,’ that is, the worldwide, ecological community which encompasses both human and more-than-human subjects. I believe the term, ‘becoming’ is a useful adjective to describe the human; becoming allows us to consider the human not as a natural or stable entity, but as one which is emerging and transforming in relation to environmental and social contexts. As a being situated within an ecological web of life, the human is not distinct from nature and more-than-human animals, but exists and changes in continuous relation to them. Long before the onset of European colonization of what is now considered North America, various dualisms permeated the European, historical imagination. Within this worldview, aspects of these dichotomies were understood to exist in fundamental distinction from one another; that is, not only were divisions of each dualism conceptualized as inherently disconnected and independent, but one aspect of each dichotomy was always understood as naturally and intrinsically superior to the other. Sallie McFague argues that the primary dualism within this imagination was the conceptualization of ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ as fundamentally distinct entities, in which reason was positioned in hierarchical relation to nature. However, this dichotomy has been broadened to represent, incorporate and interconnect with multiple other dichotomies, including, spirit/body, male/female, reason/ emotion, and human/nature (McFague, 1997: 88). According to McFague, “the [reason/nature] dualism illuminates most of the other dualisms: whatever falls on the top side of a dualism has connections with ‘reason,’ and whatever falls on the bottom side is seen as similar to ‘nature’” (1997: 88). In this sense, the projection of these constructions onto seemingly-different aspects of reality, including ‘different’ bodies, functioned to hierarchically organize both European society and the universe at large. It is important to recognize that because these dualisms were constructions of a very particular and ethnocentric group within European history, namely elite, white men, such subjects were also imagined to embody the superior aspects of various dichotomies; in other words, characteristics associated with reason were presumed to adhere to white, European males (McFague, 1997: 88). Within this imagination, the rational capacities and spiritual natures of white, masculine and European humans were imagined to prevent them from being confined by or to their bodies, or influenced by emotional or sexual responses. Importantly, because such racialized and gendered subjects were the only subjects envisioned to embody these and other superior dimensions of various dualisms, white, European men were positioned as the ideal modes of humanness within a great chain of being. In this sense, as the white, European masculine subject was assumed to embody humanness, subjects who were constructed to embody the opposing dimensions of these dichotomies were regarded as his nonhuman Others. Arguably, as the human was constructed to embody whiteness, masculinity and European ancestry, his Other may be regarded as the colonized, non-white woman. Through her gendered, racialized and cultural difference from the human, she was constructed to embody characteristics he did not. According to this dualistic relationship of interconnected difference(s), because she embodied matter, or solely bodily existence, she possesses neither inherent consciousness nor spirituality allowed by such consciousness. Because she was conceptualized as the Other to the sole, normative human, she was categorized as nonhuman. In this sense, it may be recognized how there has existed a significant, conceptual connection between non-white women and nature, as both were understood as nonhuman material beings in relation to the European, white man, who was presumed to embody true humanness. Through this ideology of the normative human subject, women and nature are conceptually demoted to a subordinate position because of what they are assumed to be (Primavesi, 1991: 142). However, this connection between nature and Aboriginal women is not only ideological: because both are regarded to exist in solely material form, and therefore to lack spiritual natures or capacities for consciousness, various manifestations of colonial violence against both nature and Aboriginal women have been historically disregarded, undermined or recognized as justified. This construction of the masculine human subject as the one who alone inhabits higher realms of reason and spirit served to legitimize and stabilize future social and religious structures of subordination and dominance. Women and nature have been placed under male domination and rule by the compelling and authoritative force of this prevailing ideology (Primavesi, 1991: 142-147). Within contemporary, North American academe, this historical, European construction of the human has been greatly interrogated, denaturalized and critiqued by postcolonial, critical race and psychoanalytic theorists, including Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, among many others. Within their theories, great energy is focused on how the articulation of humanness has, and continues to affect subjects who have been historically excluded by this rigid definition at the level of social, emotional, psychic and bodily realities. These theorists are correct in their assertions that the purpose of the human construction was to reduce the modes of being, embodied by nonwhite and non-European/nonwestern subjects, in order to elevate the mode of being embodied by their cultural Others. However, it must be recognized that there exists a subtle, but continued, hierarchical and dualistic relationship between human and nonhuman within these theories. Not only do human beings continue to be understood as stably and inherently different from nonhuman beings, principally animals, but human experiences of colonial violence, and therefore, human modes of being, are essentially recognized as more significant than the modes of being and lived realities of more-than-human beings. In fact, as the conflation of racialized humans with more-thanhumans is articulated as undermining the violence experienced by such human subjects, violence against animals and nature, in such forms as human invasion, objectification, exploitation and voracious consumption, is disregarded as violence per se. Gebara calls this trend an anthropocentric “hierarchicalizing of knowing [that actually] runs parallel to the hierarchicalizing of society, [which is] itself a characteristic of the patriarchal world” (1999: 25). In this sense, within such criticism, there is an attempt to destabilize one conception of the boundary between human and nonhuman, while a second human/nonhuman dualism is (re)produced and supported; ultimately, the traditional border, employed in colonial fantasies to distinguish what counts as (a) human and what does not, is kept intact. These attempts to distinguish the human, along with having a colonial genealogy, are built on the assumption of a distinct sphere in which humans act, and blind to ideas of significant interconnection and interdependence: dimensions of each dualism are considered not only unrelated to, but to actually oppose, one another. However, each element of social reality is constructed in relation to others; in other words, every aspect of each dichotomy involves a reference to that which is supposedly opposite, distinct from, or Other to, the primary category (See Hewitt Suchocki, 1982). In this sense, all aspects of the dichotomies require reference beyond them in order to develop as intelligible categories and, therefore, cannot be understood, or even exist, outside the relationships within which they are implicated (Hewitt Suchocki, 1982: 6—7). More importantly, there are material interrelationships that are not captured by these dichotomies. As an example we can think of contemporary environmental threats, such as global warming and Colony Collapse Disorder in North America, that illustrate how humans are not ultimately separate from nature, but dependent on it for our survival, and that ‘natural’ phenomena has the potential to powerfully and disastrously affect humans. In this sense, it must be recognized that there is danger within denial: by assuming that we are not part of nature, we ultimately deny the significance of ecological problems on their own bodies and lived realities. However, I think it necessary at this point to remark on the (neo)colonial anthropo-centrism within many conceptions of human/nature relationality. Similar to the consciousness of more-than-human animals, when ecological problems are recognized as problems per se, and especially, when such issues are recognized to transcend the human/nature divide and create an impact in the lives of humans, such problems tend to be understood in human terms. In other words, nature often becomes the subject of human attention, concern, and care when humans acknowledge the fact that we are intimately related to, and ultimately dependent on, the earth for our survival and wellbeing, and that by abusing and destroying nature and more-than-human subjects, humans ultimately bring about their own destruction. Although within such types of care, the interrelatedness among all beings within the web of life is recognized, such care for nature often develops because humans fear the effects of environmental disasters on our lives, and not because we genuinely care about the lives and wellbeing of Other creatures or the earth, in and of themselves. And even within environmental concerns, the recognition of the interrelatedness of all living subjects often leads to a hierarchy of environmental issues. Within conceptions of human/ more-than-human relations, there is often a hierarchy of environmental issues and social issues, including the (neo)colonial treatment of humans outside the dominant, white, European/western man as nonhuman, strengthening the conceptual disconnect between these human and more-than-human. These aspects of environmental interrelatedness must be regarded as not only anthropocentric, but violent, contemporary manifestations of the historically-dominant, European construction of the normative and viable human subject. In this sense, it is evident that a new consciousness must emerge. Humans must begin to recognize that, as Paula Gunn Allen states, “we are the land… the land and the people are the same… The earth is the source of being of the people and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place separate from ourselves… The land is not a mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nurtures” (Allen, as quoted in Christ, 1997: 114). Christ employs the term ‘interdependence’ in order to characterize the connection between all beings in the web of life. Yet the word interdependence must be used cautiously, for although humans are dependent on nature, animals, plants and other more-than-humans, as well as other humans for our survival, the earth is not reciprocally dependent on humans. In fact, the presence of (certain) humans on the earth has historically prevented, and continues to threaten, the flourishing and wellbeing of Others, including both human and more-than-human beings within the web of life. In this sense, concepts such as interdependence undermine the reality of power relations that exist between and among different modes of being, including human relationships and those between humans and nature. For this reason, ecofeminists’ use the notion interdependence to illustrate that humans are not separate from, but intimately implicated within, the natural world. This concept helps to demonstrate that “‘human’ beings are essentially relational and interdependent. We are tied to [‘human’ and ‘more-than-human’] Others from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our lives are dependent in more ways than we can begin to imagine on support and nurture from the web of life, from the earth body” (Christ, 1997: 136). Because the interdependent relation between human subjects and the earth is conceptualized as so intimate, human actions can have significant, and often disastrous effects on nature. However, the agency and power of nature in creating significant phenomena in the lived realities, societies and experiences of humans must also be recognized. This concept destabilizes colonial, western (and gendered) conceptions of the earth as a passive object, to be owned, harnessed, excavated and harvested in order to increase the economic and social flourishing of humans. In other words, the notion of interdependence demonstrates that humans are also affected by more-than-human lives, and that the earth is not a passive, receptive instrument to be exploited by and for human cultures. Examples such as decreased air quality and Colony Collapse Disorder illustrate the power of the earth to violently fight back against human abuse in order to protect itself. In order for a more life-affirming, harmonious relationship between the natural world and human beings to emerge and, therefore, in order to ensure the survival of all beings within the web of life, what ultimately needs to emerge is a new conception of the relationship between human and more-than-human life. McFague proposes the notion of subject-subjects relations, which encompasses a radical and life-affirming way of transforming this hierarchical relationship. According to this model, human subjects must relate to nature as a subject. While recognizing their own intrinsic relation to Other subjects, grounded in their interconnection within the web of life, human subjects must recognize morethan- human subjects’ own intrinsic value and right to live, quite apart from human interests and lives. In other words, we must recognize the otherness of morethan- humans, yet simultaneously feel a connection and recognize an affinity with such subjects. This connection “underscores both radical unity and radical individuality. It suggests a different, basic sensibility for all our knowing and doing and a different kind of know-ink and doing… It says: ‘I am a subject and live in a world of many other different subjects’” (McFague, 1997: 38). According to McFague, this will involve “the loving eye [as well as] the other senses, for it moves the eye from the mind (and the heavens) to the body (and the earth). It will result in an embodied kind of knowledge of other subjects who, like ourselves, occupy specific bodies in specific locations on this messy, muddy, wonderful, complex, mysterious earth” (Mc Fague, 1997: 36). Practicing this type of relationship will implicitly and explicitly embody a radical challenge to what it has historically meant to be both a human and nonhuman subject. It will require an erosion of the imagined boundary, grounded in the perception of difference, between human and nature, and the other, interconnected dichotomies within the European, colonial, historical imagination. It will also involve re-valuing the both sides of classic western dualisms as significant and worthy in and of themselves. This type of relationship will necessitate the erosion of concepts such as intrinsic inferiority and superiority, and potentially end the embodied and lived power relations that such concepts sanction. Perhaps most importantly, the subject-subjects relationship will allow a new understanding of the relations between all beings within the web of life to emerge; the human, that is, the normative, white, European man of the (neo)colonial imagination, and the human of the human/nature dichotomy, and his wellbeing, subjectivity, knowledge and mode of being, will be displaced of from the dominant center. Beginning to recognize and relate to more-thanhumans as subjects will inevitably represent a strong challenge to the coherence of the traditional, anthropocentric, colonial paradigm. The fantasy of humans as the sole, normative subjects within the universe has historically, and continues to provide powerful senses of security and identity to many of us; we are therefore deeply attached to this conception of humanness. However, in order for a more life affirming, harmonious relationship between the natural world and human beings to emerge, we must begin to practice such models within all of our relationships, including relationships with more-than-human beings and other human subjects. Such an endeavor is crucial for the flourishing, and ultimately, the survival of all beings within the web of life. Bibliography Christ, Carol P (1997). Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. California, Massachusetts and New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Gebara, Ivone (1999). Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hewitt Suchocki, Marjorie (1982). “Why a Relational Theology?” In God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 3-11. McFague, Sallie (1997). Super, Natural Christians: How We Should Love Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Primavesi, Anne (1991). From Apocalypse to Genesis: Ecology, Feminism and Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. i The term, ‘more-than-human’ will be used in place of the term, ‘nonhuman’ in certain areas within this paper. For a number of reasons, I believe the former term is more appropriate. Firstly, nonhuman carries connotations of difference from an explicitly human norm, and a related sense of deficiency and deviance. For this reason, I will employ nonhuman in areas in which I describe traditional, colonial human perceptions of more-than-humans. However, I believe that more-than-human conveys a sense that there literally exists significantly more than simply human realities in the world. More-than-human is also more comprehensive than related terms, such as animals or nature, as it can encompass many diverse expressions of realities, experiences and subject(ivitie)s that transcend traditional constructions of humanness.

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles. This thesis offers a theoretical contribution to this juncture by bringing together the feminist economic geography of JK Gibson-Graham and the deconstructive philosophical practice of Jacques Derrida. Gibson-Graham’s framework of diverse economies has become a major contribution to thinking and practising postcapitalist politics. It offers a popular affirmative and experimental approach to collective life, one that discards the givenness of economic truths and power in favour of a heterogeneous landscape of interdependent agency. Here, however, the attention is on Gibson-Graham’s early, theoretical examination and critique of capitalocentrism: the omission, forgetting and subjugation of existing more-than-capitalist economies. This notion underlines the necessity to unlearn capitalist homogeneity in order for a plural, prismatic economy of coexistence to come to view: the worst forms of exploitation coexisting with the best of emancipations, both demanding situated negotiation and collective action. Capitalocentrism functions as a conceptual ground of the diverse economies framework, yet its theoretical, empirical and political complexity has largely been left unexamined. While the concept of capitalocentrism works to motivate its alternatives, its use simultaneously exhibits an unproblematised belief in overcoming the problem of postcapitalist burdens. To think capitalocentrism as a continuous, unownable task, rather than a solid stepping stone for emancipation, it is theorised here as an inheritance with the help of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida’s ‘rigorously parasitic’ approach towards constitutive givens and his negotiation of troubling legacies offer a distinct approach to received problematics. Here, his writings on heritage, archives and violence are examined as situated practices of reinterpretative work with/in various legacies. This allows a distinct conceptual and methodological approach to inheritances that pivots on a vigilance of (self-)critique and a practice of close, complicit reading. The inheritedness of our textual materiality, with its historical promises and perils all too closely intertwined, becomes the issue. It allows a persistent negotiation of and oscillation between determinate, situated problematics and the incalculable and unlocatable. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism becomes a heterogeneous and unownable legacy that both enables and haunts the thinking of postcapitalist space and economy. Developing such a conceptual and methodological approach to postcapitalist problems, this thesis studies capitalocentric inheritances in four main chapters. First, the concept of capitalocentrism and its critical role in Gibson-Graham’s framework is treated in light of deconstruction’s promises. Second, Derrida’s economies of violence are studied to conceptualise capitalocentrism as a problem of history. Third, popular and academic debates concerning postcapitalism are explored as negotiations of capitalocentric inheritances. Fourth, the capitalocentrism of language itself becomes the issue as a problematic negotiated in sites and theories of translation. Altogether, this study proposes an attention to postcapitalist economic geographies that supplements emancipatory approaches with a critical-deconstructive attention to their limitations. Amidst immediate demands for social and economic transformation, it underlines what mediates those demands: the troubled language, the complicit sensorium that we inherit. By offering fresh grounds for rethinking the inherited futures of space and economy, it submits a challenge to claims that purport to govern and overcome the postcapitalist problem of constitutive burdens. As an inheritance, capitalocentrism necessitates drastic renegotiations of postcapitalist givens. This task is here called, tentatively, postcapitalist studies. Keywords capitalocentrism, deconstruction, diverse economies, inheritance, Jacques Derrida, JK Gibson-Graham, postcapitalist studies

This article attempts to analyze how R.K. Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi draws a polyphonic picture about woman, life, and the nature of Malgudi from an ecofeminist perspective. It attempts to explore how the theory of ecofeminism that was originally hypothesized in the West is echoed in Narayan’s novel The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) based on an Indian setting. This work is an attempt to evaluate and analyze the roles and positions of women and nature that philosophically and phenomenally resembles each other in The Man-Eater of Malgudi with an ecofeminist approach. Ecofeminism or ecological feminism is now very valid in the academic and literary world. The present paper examines the selected novel under the lens of oriental view towards woman and nature where both are closely associated with each other. Women are victims of degradation, domination, and exploitation, yet they play the role to bring ecological harmony and sustainability. The way Rangi, though oppressed by patriarchy, attempts to save the elephant; Kumar mirrors the purpose of eco-feminism; to create a balance in nature by establishing an inter-cooperative, consistent and unbiased relationship with all creatures of the world irrespective of gender, class, and color. The interrelationship and inter-connectivity between woman and nature are strongly highlighted in this paper through the character Rangi who dismisses Vasu’s anti-ecological ventures.

The starting point of this text is the concern for the impacts that the extractive offensive is generating in the territories and means of existence that have historically guaranteed the sustenance and reproduction of human and non-human life on the planet. This offensive is part of a historical and continuous dynamic of exploitation and appropriation of nature for the accumulation of capital, that has intensified in all the countries of Latin America in the last two decades. In this text, I present some interpretative guidelines and bridges between critical Marxism, ecology and feminism to understand the socio-ecological impacts that the metabolism of patriarchal capitalism generates in the web of life. about it and would be helpful if we knew the exact timeline.

In the reconceptualisation era of curriculum studies, scholars drew on a range of theories such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, and especially critical theory. They used critical theory as a lens to examine the influence of social and political forces on curriculum, in particular the role of dominant ideologies on schooling and higher education in capitalist societies. In this article we explore some of the limitations this has, especially with regard to the current posthuman condition, without repudiating all the benefits that it has offered. Then we re/think curriculum studies in the posthuman condition, drawing on insights from a particular strand of posthumanism, critical posthumanism. We experiment with the real, as well as with what a reconceptualised subject (one that is ecological) might mean for curriculum inquiry in South Africa. In our exploration, we re/think the curriculum concepts: curriculum-as-lived, curriculum as complicated conversation, and currere.

The world’s centre of gravity is changing, from the North Atlantic to Eastern Asia. As world centres of knowledge have correlated historically with world centres of power, this ongoing geopolitical change is likely to bring changes also to the global map of cognition. Knowledge and power are intrinsically related, knowledge is power, it is based on power, and it produces instruments of power. Moreover, the vistas of social scientists and scholars are always circumscribed by the power relations of the social world they are studying. A way of looking into this is to analyse the concepts and the narratives they use and produce. What features do they highlight, and what do they hide? Cognitive change is driven by two kinds of change, change (i.e. new discovery) of evidence, and change of power. On a macro scale, the major forces of power change bearing upon cognitive change have been social mobilizations, for example, of classes, women, and ethnic groups, the rise and decline of states, and, third, economic or ecological crises disrupting the functioning of existing powers. Indigenization and de-Westernization are different programmes. The former is synonymous with nativization and rooting in the particular culture of a population, whereas the latter may be, and often is, an emancipation from Western cultural domination in the name of another universalistic culture. De-Westernization is inherently confrontational, whereas indigenization may range from supplementary to isolationist. Academic indigenization and de-Westernization have in their cognitive challenges similarities with contemporary critical identity movements, such as feminism and ethnic movements. The cognitive challenges mounted by both types of currents proceed across four levels of cognitive depths, claiming canon inclusion of certain thinkers and role models, questioning and rejection of prevailing social narratives, practising new forms of knowledge production, and fourth epistemological or meta-sociological reflections on the old and the new knowledge paradigms. Indigenization should be treated as a limited supplementary project, whereas de-Westernization is likely to advance. It should be an opening of global horizons, not a closure. Pluralism of critique, challenge, and search for other, better ways are decisive for the development of knowledge.

Explorations of the intersecting terrain between the resources (or mining) sector and gendered socialisation are gaining currency (Laplonge and Albury; Lahiri-Dutt). Some argue that mine workers and their families are particularly vulnerable to divorce, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, injury, violence and worksite conflict, mental health struggles, financial over-extension, isolation, and loss of familial and community connection (Ashby; Paddenburg 14). Others contradict anecdotal evidence to support these concerns (Clifford 58; BHP Billiton 11-5). Substantive research on the emotional cost of mining remains sparse and contested (Windsor 4). Of concern to some, however, is that mining companies may be placing pressure on employees to generate a profit (Brough 10), while failing to acknowledge the cost of “hypermasculinised” mechanisms of domination that characterise mining cultures (Laplonge, Roadshow). I refer to these characteristic mechanisms of domination throughout this paper as “malestream norms” (O’Brien 62). In this paper, I argue that mining cultures have become prime examples of unsustainable practices. They forfeit relationally and ecologically sensitive modes of production that would otherwise celebrate and indeed prioritise a holistic level of care for the Earth, mining cultures, work colleagues and the self. Here, the term “sustainable” refers to a broader spectrum of social, cultural, psychological and ecological needs of mine workers, mining culture, and the environment upon which mining profits depend. I posit that mining communities that tend to the psycho-social needs of mine workers beyond malestream norms are more likely to implement sustainable mining practices that are not only considerate of the broader needs of mine workers, not only profitable for mining companies, but care for the Earth as well. Granted, employee assistance mechanisms do include substantial support services (such as health and wellness programmes, on-site counselling and therapy, mining family support networks, shorter rosters, improved access to family contact from site, etc.). However, these support services—as they may be offered by individual mining companies—do not adequately address the broader psycho-social impact of mining on mine site communities, the relational integrity of mine workers with their families, or how mine workers are faring within themselves in light of the pressures that abound both on-swing and off (Lahiri-Dutt 201). Discussions of a “softer” approach to mining fail to critically analyse malestream norms (Laplonge, Roadshow). In other words, attempts to make mining more sustainable have at-best been superficial by, for example, seeking to increase numbers of women on-site but then “jamming” these new women into cultures of hypermasculinism in hopes that a “trickle-down affect” of softening mining communities of practice will ensue (Laplonge, "You Can't Rely"). A comprehensive approach to sustainable mining practices must begin with deeper psycho-social care for mine workers (both women and men), and shift mining culture towards environmental care as well—an approach to mining that reflects a holistic and integrated model for pursuing profitable company development that is more caring than is currently the norm throughout the corporate world (Anderson). To accomplish this, we must specifically challenge malestream norms as they manifest in mining (Laplonge, Roadshow). In response, I introduce ecological masculinism as a relational approach to softening the malestream norms that pervade mining. To begin, it is recognised that mining masculinities—like all practices of masculinity—are pluralised social constructions that are not fixed but learned (Connell). Ecological masculinism is explored as a path towards fresh systemic practices that can steer men in mining towards masculine identities that are relationally attuned, emotionally articulate, and environmentally aware. It is argued that the approach to mining masculinities introduced here can help the resources sector become more sustainable for men, more conducive to greater numbers of women, more profitable for mining companies over longer periods of time, and gentler on the Earth. Where Are All the Ecomasculinists in Mining? Ecology as a science of relationships can serve as a guide towards the order that emerges among complex systems such as those that pervade mining (Capra). I suggest that Ecology can assist us to better understand and redefine the intricacies of gender dynamics in mining. It would be easy to presume that Ecology is oppositional to mining. I argue that to the contrary, the relational focus of Ecology has much to teach us about how we might reconfigure malestream norms to make it possible for mining cultures to demonstrate deeper care for others and the self at work and at home. An ecological analysis of malestream norms (and their impacts on Earth, community, others and the self) is not new. Richard Twine initiated some of the earliest explorations of the intersecting terrain between men, masculinities and the Earth. This discourse on the need for an “ecologisation” of masculinities grew out of the “broad church” of ecological feminism that explored so called Logics of Dualism that malestream norms construct and maintain (Plumwood 55-59). For more than 40 years, ecological feminism has served as a specialised discourse interrogating the mutual oppression of women and Nature by the male-dominated world. In his contribution to the Essex Ecofem Listerv, Twine posted the following provocative statement: Where are all the ecomasculinists? … there does not seem to be any literature on how the environmental and feminist movements together form a strong critique of the dominant Western masculine tradition. Does anyone know of any critical examinations … of this position, particularly one that addresses masculinity rather than patriarchy? (Twine et al. 1) Twine highlighted the need for a new discourse about men and masculinities that built on the term “ecomasculinity.” This term was originally coined by Shepherd Bliss in his seminal paper Revisioning Masculinity: A Report on the Growing Men's Movement (1987). I suggest that this intersecting terrain between Ecology and masculinities can guide us beyond the constraints of malestream norms that are entrenched in mining and offer us alternatives to mining cultural practices that oppress women and men as well as the environment upon which mining depends. However, these early investigations into the need for more nurturing masculinities were conceptual more so than practical and failed to take hold in scholarly discourses on gender or the pluralised praxes of modern masculinities. Coupled with this, the dominating aspects of malestream norms have continued to characterise mining cultures resulting in, for example, higher than average injury rates that are indicators of some negative consequences of a hypermasculinised workplace (Department of Health, WA 18; Laplonge, Roadshow). Further, the homophobic elements of malestream norms can give many men cause to hesitate seeking out emotional support if and where needed for fear of peer-group ridicule. These are some of the ways that men are subject to “men’s oppression” (Smith; Irwin et al.; Jackins; Whyte; Rohr), a term used here not to posit men as victims but rather as individuals who suffer as a result of their own internalised sense of superiority that drives them to behave inequitably towards other men, women and the Earth. Men’s Oppression Men’s oppression is a term used to illuminate the impact of malestream norms on men’s lives. Richard Rohr noted that: Part of our oppression as men ... is that we are taught to oppress others who have less status than we do. It creates a pecking order and a sense of superiority. We especially oppress racial minorities, homosexuals, the poor and women. (28) Men’s oppression is harmful to men, women and the ways that we mine the Earth. It is consequently of great importance that we explore the impacts of men’s oppression on mining masculinities with an emphasis on deconstructing the ways that it shapes and maintains malestream norms in mining culture. Men’s oppression pressures men to behave in ways that can constrain the spectrum of permissible behaviours that they adopt. Men’s oppression is ego-driven, based in comparing and competing against each other and pressure them to work tirelessly towards being better, higher, stronger, more virile, smarter, richer, more powerful, outwardly composed and more adored by others through status and material wealth often acquired at the expense of others and indeed the compromising of their own capacities to care for others and the self. These products of malestream norms validate an inner sense of feeling good about oneself at the expense of relational connection with others, including the Earth. As mentioned previously, malestream norms enable men to acquire socioeconomic and political advantages. But this has occurred at what has proven to be a terrible cost for all others as well as men themselves. Many men, especially those most strongly immersed in malestream norms, don’t even know that they are subject to this internalise superiority nor do they recognise it as an oppression that afflicts them at the same time and through the same mechanisms that assures their primacy in a world.. Notably, the symptoms of men’s oppression are not unique to mining. However, this form of oppression is intensely experienced by miners precisely because of the isolated and hypermasculine nature of minthat men (and increasing numbers of women) find themselves immersed in when on-site. Unfortunately, perceiving and then countering men’s oppression can undermine men’s primacy (Smith 51-52). As a consequence many men have little reason to want to take a stand against malestream norms that can come to dominate their lives at work and home. But to refuse to do so can erode their health and well-being and set them on a path of perpetration of oppressive thoughts, words and deeds towards others. Pathways to Ecological Masculinism The conceptual core of ecological masculinism is constructed on five precepts (that I refer to as the ADAMN model). These precepts help guide modern Western men towards greater care for others and the self in tangible ways (Pulé). Accompanying these precepts is the need for a plurality of caring behavioural possibilities for men to emerge. Men are encouraged to pursue inner congruency (aligning head with heart and intuition) as a pathway to their fuller humanness so that more integrated and mature masculinities can emerge. In this sense, ecological masculinism can be adapted to any work or home situation, providing a robust and versatile model that redresses gendered norms amongst mining men despite the diversity of individuals and resistances that might characterise some mining cultures. The ADAMN model draws on the vernacular encouragement for men to “give a damn” about all others and themselves. The five key instructions of masculine ecologisation are: A: Accept the central premise that you were born good and have an infinite capacity to care and be caring D: Don’t separate yourself from others; instead strengthen and rebuild your sense of connection with others and yourself A: Amend your own past hurts and any you have caused to others M: Model mature modern masculinity. Construct your masculine identity on caring thoughts, words and actions that nurture the relational space between yourself and others by seeking a life of service for the common good N: Normalise men’s care; support all men to show their care as central features of being a mature modern man Collectively, these key instructions of the ADAMN model are designed to raise men’s capacities to care for others and the self. They are aspects of ecological masculinism that are introduced to men through large group presentations, working with teams and at the level of one-on-one coaching in order to facilitate the recovering of the fuller human self that emerges through masculine ecologisation. This aspect of ecological masculinism offers tangible alternatives to malestream norms that dominate mining cultures by subverting the oppressive aspects of malestream norms in mining with more integrated levels of care for all others and the self. The ADAMN model is drawn as a nested diagram where each layer of this work forms the foundations of and is imbedded within the next, taking an individual man on a step-by-step journey that charts a course towards a heightened relational self and in so doing shifts the culture of masculinities within which he is immersed (see Figure 1). Trials of the ADAMN model over the past three years have applied ecological masculinism to groups of miners, at first in larger groups where hypermasculinised men can remain anonymous. From there masculine ecologisation drills down into the personal stories of individual men’s lives to uncover the sources of individual adherence to malestream norms—interrogating the pressures at play for them to have donned the “armour” that malestream norms demand of them. Stepping further towards the self, we then explore group and team dynamics for examples of hypermasculinism in the context of its benefits and costs to individual men’s lives in a support group type setting, and finally refine the transformational elements of this exploratory in one-on-one coaching of men across the spectrum from natural leaders to those in crises. At this final level of intensive personal reflection, an individual man is coached towards integrative alignment of his head, heart and intuition so that he can discover fresh perspectives for accessing his caring self. The project’s hope is that from this place of heightened “inner congruency” the ecologised man can more easily awaken and engage his care for others and himself not only as a man, but as an active and engaged citizen whose life of service to his employer, community, family, friends, and himself, becomes a central fixture of the ways he interacts with others at work and at home. Effectively, ecological masculinism reaches beyond the constraints of hypermasculinism as it commonly pervades mining by “peeling the onion” of malestream norms in a step-wise manner. It is hoped that, if the ADAMN model is successful, that the emerging “ecomen” become more sensitive to the needs, wants and intrinsic rights of others, develop rich emotional vocabularies, embrace the value of abstract thinking and a strong and engaged intuition concurrently, engage with others compassionately, educate themselves about their world at work and home, willingly assume leadership on the job, within their families and throughout their communities and grow proactively through the process. Such men embody a humanistic worldview towards all of life. They are flexible, responsive, and attentive to the value of others and themselves. Such is the ecoman I suggest might best benefit resource companies, mining cultures, mining families and miners.Figure 1 Conclusion Central to a more gender-aware future for men in mining is hope—hope that we will adapt to the challenges of mining culture swiftly by reaching beyond engineered solutions to the problems that many mine workers face; hope that our responses will be humanistic, creative and transgress malestream norms; hope that those responses are inclusive of softer and more caring approaches mining masculinities. This hope hinges on the willingness of resource companies to support such a shift in mining culture towards greater care for all others and the self. One path towards this fresh future for mining is through ecological masculinism as I have introduced it here. This new conversation for mining men and masculinities gives priority to the ending of men’s oppression for the benefit of individual mining men as well as all those with whom they share their lives at work and at home. In this paper, my intention has been to emphasise a more caring approach to mining. It is my earnest belief that through such work, mining will become more sustainable for men, women and the Earth. The ecologised mining man will have an important role to play in such a transformation.ReferencesAnderson, Ray. Our Sustainability Journey – Mission Zero. 2008. 29 April 2013 ‹http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Interface-Story.aspx›. Ashby, Nicole. The Need for FIFO Families. Personal Interview. 11 Dec 2012. BHP Billiton. 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Understanding of the after effects of industrialization on ecological balance it is helpful to study human culture through a reunion of the theme of 'nature' as it is depicted in the works of different writers who write for nature; and thereby highlight the harmful effects of human alliance with nature. Anita Desai belongs to the genre of such writers who fits herself with the basic ideas of the environmentalists and ecologists. Fire on the Mountain publicises ecoawareness by acknowledging the landscape, by expressing human actions in animal terms, by representing to us the diverse nature of mountain biosphere and connecting them with various moods of feminist behaviour; and thus aims at achieving an integral relationship between woman and nature.