Keywords

Introduction

This book is a contribution to the vital response of feminist political ecology (FPE) to global environmental, climate, health, economic and political crises and their impact on life in all its diversity. We sketch out how FPE is responding to these crises based on a series of multi-sited, cross-generational and inter/transdisciplinary dialogues held over the last four years in the Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and Community Innovative Training Network (WEGO-ITN). In the tradition of FPE, the book embraces a deliberately open-ended approach. It does not intend to define or delimit FPE through a series of descriptive analyses of key concepts or specific case studies, or a showcasing of new methodologies. Instead, it is a series of conversations that take up the concerns and troubles that have emerged around the WEGO-ITN collaborative process.

The book is made up of a series of dialogues that navigate theory and practice, individual and collective engagements at the edge of academic and activist desires to produce politically meaningful knowledge, building on the insights of empirical research and feminist theory. The chapters cover on-line exhibitions on extractivism, intimate discussions on embodied experiences of ill health and pregnancy, discussions around ageing and care, storytelling and emotional engagements with water and contested academic debates around population and political protests. The variety of situations, places and concerns illustrates in numerous ways in which FPE scholarship is shaped by everyday and embodied lives within damaged, dynamic and contested environments, as well as by hope in collaborative ventures on the margins of academic practices. The book shows how FPE as a convening space fostering vibrant and engaged research processes at the intersection of feminist and environmental theory and practice.

Acknowledging the importance of these embodied experiences, FPE promotes grounded and engaged research to understand and make visible political processes, including the emotions and embodied reactions and responses of people and communities to economic, social and environmental change. It recognises that knowledge is generated on different scales, including day-to-day experiences. FPE is in dialogue with various feminist and environmental justice communities, as well as the academic community, and strives to do non-extractive research through a participatory process of co-production which translates multiple experiences with the environment with respect and care. FPE challenges us to ask: what are the ethics and moral norms that shape our knowledge production? How can we use that knowledge to build culturally safe and secure spaces that recognise situated struggles, multiple imaginaries and bodily diversities? The book itself reflects this with different takes on what FPE means in both theory and practice, hence the authors are intentionally explicit about the context, embodied and epistemic positioning of their different voices and experiences.

In this introduction, we first position the book’s discussions with other FPE texts. We then look at how the book evolved from the WEGO-ITN experience of open-ended intergenerational and inter/transdisciplinary conversations, followed by a summary of the key themes that emerge in the book chapters. In conclusion, we ask, ‘where do we go from here?’ and indicate some future directions for FPE research and practice.

Engaging with FPE Conversations

The conversations in Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) with which this book engages are as broad as they are deep. We find Diane Rocheleau’s metaphor of ‘rooted networks’ (Rocheleau, 2015) useful for capturing the breadth and range of our engagements in this diverse and open-ended area of practice and thought. The debates that emerge around attempts to chart and define FPE are testament to the situatedness of knowledge claims that are made when mapping such conversations. For example, Elmhirst’s (2011) review began from Rocheleau et al.’s (1996) landmark text that first coined the phrase Feminist Political Ecology, and from this starting point, Elmhirst’s review centred on works that brought feminist theorisations of subjectivity to bear on issues of dispossession, resource access and control. Taking a similar tack, but more mindful of FPE’s relationship with global South feminisms, Resurrección (2017) considers FPE through the relationship between gender and development studies and activist ecofeminisms, while Harcourt and Nelson (2015) narrate FPE through queer ontologies and post-humanist body politics. Other scholars have pressed further to challenge the hegemonies of white, Anglophone knowledge practices to tell a story of FPE through environmental justice and critical race theory (Mollett, 2017; Mollett et al., 2020) and through decolonial and anticolonial ecological feminist thinking and practice (Ojeda et al., 2022; Sultana, 2021; Sundberg, 2017). Such reviews reflect the temporality of broader intellectual currents and political demands, the often hemispheric spatialities of authors’ rooted networks and journeys between activism, academia and policy arenas. Stories about FPE reflect differently situated conversations within FPE.

Thus, in this section which positions and honours the histories and many conversations on which this book is built rather than presenting a singular narrative of Feminist Political Ecology’s ‘origins’ and engagements, we introduce a multiplicity of starting points and ongoing conversations that have inspired the chapters in this book, and indeed, the WEGO project. These plural starting points reflect and continue to influence an ever emergent but enduring set of practices, values and ethical principles underpinning FPE, and provide a source for the concepts that guide and are developed in the academic practice of FPE. Mindful of the tyranny of exclusion and inclusion in any effort to ‘map’ FPE in the knowledges we value in the practice of academic citation, we reference the different texts here in order to point readers to the diverse conversations in which we engaged with FPE and, as Max Liboiron writes to indicate to readers ‘the relations we want to build…enacting good relations in a text, through a text’ (Liboiron, 2021, p. 1).

For some of us, FPE emerged out of Political Ecology and critical development studies, which focus on how power operates within socio-ecological relations and research practice. Here, inspiration has come from ecofeminism (Seager, 1993; Shiva, 1988), feminist science and technology studies (Harding, 1991) and postcolonial feminist critiques of development (Agarwal, 1998; Mohanty, 2003). FPE has engaged the Black feminist concept of intersectionality (Cho et al., 2013) to move beyond a singular and homogenising focus on women and/or gender binaries. Instead, attention is drawn to multiple intersecting inequalities (e.g., race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age and geographical location) and how these are reproduced and perpetuated within particular landscapes (Mollett, 2017; Rocheleau et al., 1996). This has deepened analysis within ‘traditional’ political ecology concerns such as dispossession and extractivism (Mollett, 2018), and conservation, access and exclusion (Sundberg, 2004). Researchers within FPE have taken an intersectional analysis to explore ecological relations, developing conceptualisations that show how environmental subjectivities are forged through relations with nature and everyday material practices (Nightingale, 2011).

These conversations have embraced a focus on overlooked spheres of political ecological life, including lived experiences in the everyday (Harris, 2015) and embodied practices (Sultana, 2011) as sites of emotion, meaning and affect (Gururani, 2002; Singh, 2013). Space has opened to understand environmental conflicts beyond cognitive valuations of nature, where ‘emotional political ecology’ focuses attention on ‘what one is allowed to remember, feel, enjoy or live’ (González-Hidalgo & Zografos, 2020, p. 236; Velicu, 2015). Cross-cutting these themes, this branch of FPE has found inspiration from feminist critiques of science around who counts as a knowledge producer, what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is produced (Sundberg, 2017). FPE draws on Haraway’s (2001) concept of situated knowledge, which unmasks the aura of scientific objectivity, and instead foregrounds the embodied social relations from which knowledge emerges (Nightingale, 2003). This conversation has been central in building FPE research practice that aims to be ethical and accountable, and to avoid reproducing power relations.

A third and related set of conversations in FPE emerges around questions of sufficiency, degrowth and commoning as launch points for reversing the damaging logics of unrelenting capitalist economic growth and extractive nature-society relations, understood as a crisis of social reproduction (Barca, 2020; Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2016). Inspiration here is drawn from feminist activism and scholarship that seeks instead to value all life-sustaining labour, thus foregrounding relations and economies of care (Tronto, 2015) and replacing efficiency with sufficiency (Wichterich, 2015). FPE draws on ecofeminist theoretical roots (Mellor, 2006; Shiva, 1988) to advocate ethical relations with more-than-human species and the natural world as part of a wider ethics of care (Di Chiro, 2017). Deeper engagements with narratives of restorative and transformative justice (Agostino, 2018) are explored, with the aim of living and being ‘otherwise’: fostering reciprocity, community and care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In engaging with these concerns, FPE is enriched through its links with the community economies research led by JK Gibson-Graham et al. (2020), recent organising around feminist degrowth (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019) and with Indigenous and other worldviews that question the Eurocentric paradigm of growth, instead expressing ideas of living and flourishing within ecological principles (Kothari et al., 2014; Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019).

Finally, an important set of conversations in FPE emerges through engagement with decolonial thought, which addresses the epistemic privilege, violence and authority held in Eurocentric ways of knowing, being and doing (Fanon, 2001; Quijano, 2000). Decolonial conversations around feminism in FPE have explored how Western (Eurocentric) attempts to categorise, control and manage nature also involve control over racialised and gendered bodies (Lugones, 2010), expressed by some decolonial feminists through the concept of cuerpo-tierra-territorio (body–land–territory). In capturing the dynamics of racism, capitalism and gender oppression that underpin the coloniality of dispossessions, extractivism and embodied experience, similar connections are drawn between body, land and territory through different registers in other Indigenous places (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019). In attending to the coloniality of gender and the historicization of the Eurocentric hierarchization of (white) humans above more-than-human nature, decolonial perspectives in FPE opens space for alternative and pluriversal possibilities of ‘being in relation’. From communities that fight socio-ecological harms through thinking and being ‘otherwise’, the prefigurative everyday practices within anticolonial feminist ecological activisms model ethical relationships with other species and the natural world (Candraningram, 2018) and inspire the practice of FPE.

In the next section we set out how each chapter is engaging in these diverse, and overlapping, conversations, but before we turn to that mapping out of the FPE threads weaving through the book, we need to explain how the book emerged through the WEGO-ITN which many of the authors belong.

WEGO-ITN: Collective Learning Process

In this section we take a moment to reflect on how WEGO-ITN’s collective learning process helped to map out new areas and methodological approaches in FPE as set out in the book. WEGO-ITN ran from 2018 to 2022, funded by the EU. With 15 PhD projects at its core, it evolved into a network of scholar-activists working on feminist political ecology from institutions in Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands, the UK in the EU and outside the EU in Australia, India, Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Uruguay and the USA. WEGO-ITN is positioned in different disciplines (political ecology, feminist studies, human geography, anthropology and critical development studies) and has explored a wide range of topics (as reflected in the book) from extractivism, commoning, care, communities, livelihoods, embodied subjectivities to degrowth resistances to mainstream economic development. The network aimed to do self-reflective and non-extractive feminist research, working with individuals, local communities and social movements, contributing to FPE debates in and out of academic spaces.

In its approach, WEGO-ITN took up a grounded understanding of FPE to look at how everyday practices of social difference, environmental change and political economies across scales in ‘a process of doing environmentalism, justice and feminism differently’ (Harcourt & Nelson, 2015, p. 9). WEGO-ITN’s emphasis has been to undertake research and other activities that discern social and ecological injustices at the intersection of systems of oppression (patriarchy, race, class, coloniality, speciesism) and collectively build equitable social and ecological transformation (Cho et al., 2013; Elmhirst, 2018). As the network has recorded on its website, WEGO-ITN has explored the multiple forms of knowledge that shape and co-construct environmental practices and the politics of the everyday through intersectional forms of social difference such as gender, class, ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality, place and nation. In its different projects, WEGO-ITN has raised questions on how nature, culture and society co-constitute each other, learning from critiques of science by feminist theories, queer theories and environmental humanities, and decolonial critiques of whiteness and privilege.

In constructing the chapters as dialogues, the book is grounded in the ongoing conversations that made up the collaborative WEGO-ITN research process. The designing, writing and editing of the book was built into the WEGO-ITN training with a series of cross-generational conversations (mostly on-line) among supervisors, mentors and partners, emerging from the 15 PhD projects undertaken by early career researchers. It is important to note that running through the research process are reflections on how COVID-19 changed the nature and focus of WEGO-ITN’s research in creative and unexpected ways. Going on-line meant opening up new questions about embodied and in-place convergences and between personal and political space. This posed a challenge in the implementation of feminist methodologies engaged with participatory action research techniques, but it also allowed for creativity to transform the way we employ digital spaces to reach voices far from the places the research is situated. The last years of the pandemic raised diverse questions around languages of care in feminist and environmental justice research, and politics. The encounters with the virus and the isolation it engendered reinforced conversations about how to include more-than-human actors to think with non-western epistemologies, natures and voices.

Reflecting on the complex processes of running a network that was designed for face-to-face connections mainly on-line, the chapters also look at how FPE as a research process based on feminist ethics could respond and adapt to disruptions. The book’s conversations move in and out the ethics of doing feminist research aware of historical and contemporary positions of power, paying attention to the authors’ shifting positionalities, origins and choices of how to do research. The conversations reflect how it is important to make visible the troubles of doing politically engaged research while learning from the COVID-19 pandemic’s restrictions on mobility and face-to-face engagement, as well as the possibilities of using the technical openings in digital space. The chapters illustrate the different ways to produce feminist intersectional and intergenerational knowledge paying attention to research as political and ethical practice on-line—across geo-political and language differences, differential access to Internet and technical barriers, etc. The book therefore features a range of styles reflecting different possibilities: each of the authors had to write and reflect from wherever they had landed during the collaborative process. Such an open approach has helped to create new methodological, theoretical and epistemological ways of doing research across geographical arenas, breaking down older barriers around needing to travel and be in-place. As a result, most of the writing is collaborative and fluid, allowing for reflective, emotional and creative responses to the thorny questions being asked around power, resistance and pain, with some chapters using art, photos, pictures as well as storytelling.

By showcasing the experiential and emotional nature of doing FPE research, the book illustrates the continuous praxis of feminist knowledge production and how it is built through relationships in specific sites, including in digital space. By using the form of conversation and making transparent the positioning of the authors, the book’s methodology is itself a critique of normative scientific models that are based on the idea of the rational and disembodied researcher. The choice of writing conversations is also a way to keep enquiries open, as the chapters do not attempt to resolve the questions, but to probe and highlight diverse perspectives, contradictions, self-reflexivity, as well as the complexities of intergenerational and intersectional researcher–participant relations. Storytelling is the vehicle we use to recognise the plurality of ways of producing knowledge, such as orality, and distances us from modern hegemonic stories and rational economic narratives that support the existence of a unique and absolute truth. In this way, the book embraces feminist research as a continuous learning and unlearning process.

The book acknowledges the productive tension around putting together a collaborative feminist book positioned on the margins of academe, yet also funded by the EU and hosted by a whole set of academic practices, including consolidating careers and gaining a PhD. The chapters navigate the uneasiness of the funding/research/praxis, with the political aim to do societally relevant and meaningful non-extractive research. Each chapter contains a back and forth between method and theory, between the known and unknown, what counts as knowledge and data and how to respect ‘otherwise’ logics and world views. While the chapters on decoloniality address some of these concerns most directly, each chapter reflects on what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge we are able to share, concerns which deeply informed the WEGO-ITN project.

Themes Emerging from the Book’s Conversations

As the title ‘Contours of Feminist Political Ecology’ suggests, the book aims to sketch out a series of common debates in feminism and political ecology, re-opening and troubling themes such as population (Chapter 10), extractivism (Chapters 2 and 3) and more-than-human relationalities (Chapter 6), while also touching on topics that are not often unpacked or mobilised in political ecology, such as ageing (Chapter 5), health and the body (Chapters 4 and 12) and the use of art in research and activism (Chapters 3 and 11). The book also revisits central themes in feminist debates, such as care (Chapters 7 and 8) and decoloniality (Chapters 9 and 12) through a political ecology viewpoint. Finally, it engages with plural imaginings and futures of socio-ecological transformations, informed by critical feminist thinking. Importantly, the chapters in this book engage with these themes and topics in a dialogical and open-ended way, shaping together contours of FPE that are intentionally and explicitly porous and incomplete. The stories told in many of the chapters often originate from different geographies and include distinct identities, histories and place-based complexities. Going beyond a mere comparison between such cases, each chapter presents these stories as opportunities to reflect together on the analytical and theoretical frameworks that link them together and which emerge from our ongoing dialogue and interactions as researchers in the WEGO network.

A common thread running through the chapters is the effort made by the authors to situate ourselves in the writing process, as we write stories about places we visited (and/or inhabit), people we interact(ed) with, communities we learn with and systems of power and oppression that touch upon us in very different yet very connected ways. This is expressed not so much in dry declarations of our nationality, profession or skin colour, but more in terms of autobiographies of pain and illness connected to place, gender and race (see Chapter 4), intimate and embodied understandings of theory such as age (Chapter 5) and decoloniality (Chapters 9 and 12), honest sharing of frustrations and fears over topics such as population growth and population control (Chapter 10), and the placing of personal memories of place and more-than-human connections under an analytical lens of subjectivity formation (Chapters 6 and 12). All chapters strive to remain aware of how the knowledge we produce is necessarily tied to our own histories and positionalities.

A key theme and point of reflection in many of the chapters are the interrogation of knowledge politics and how such politics are often tied to colonial and patriarchal histories and legacies. Dismantling such ways of thinking around ‘natural resources’ and broader ecologies, including those of human bodies, as well as ways to confront the climate crisis, or ways of living that provide meaning and well-being to communities, is a question engaged with from different starting points and geographies. In Chapter 2, authors reflect on the COP26 process and the dominant discourse perpetuating climate colonialism in these arenas, underpinned by processes of capitalism, imperialism and development. They counter-pose these dominant notions of climate denialism, greenwashing and scripts for unjust transitions, including Net Zero, with the intimate and untold stories of oil palm and extractivism in Indonesia, environmental change and climate impacts in pastoralist communities in Kenya and resistance to onshore oil extraction in the UK. Through their analysis, they show how extractivism and climate coloniality take form and operate in the everyday, including in false solidarities, but also how communities articulate alternatives that subvert such narratives in practice. Chapter 3 continues that interrogation, reflecting on the process, experiences and learnings of co-curating a series of exhibitions and events as part of a feminist ecological politics. The authors look at how such experiences cultivated care, foregrounded community and wove connections between extractive contexts. They pay close attention to how the emotional and the embodied enter scholar-activist exhibition spaces as a way to resist extractivism and find solidarity. Chapter 4 engages with the themes of porosity and embodiment to trouble knowledge produced and reproduced around health and bodies in relation to local ecologies and understandings of place through the narration of experiences around endometriosis, malaria and hyperemesis gravidarum in Southern Europe and the USA. Authors show the political ecological nature not only of the occurrence of illness, but also of the discourse generated around it and its causes and its risks. The authors point to the reproduction of intersectional injustices as well as ways to resist them, involving the use of certain technologies.

Pushing FPE thinking on injustices further, Chapter 9 unpacks and challenges the Eurocentric context of meaning making with reflections on the authors’ epistemic relationship with coloniality. They share with the reader their place-based position as researchers from the ‘global’ South, defining their research as an outcome of thinking through decoloniality. They explore how FPE and decoloniality give diverse meanings to subjectivity, the body and the other as they outline how decoloniality informs FPE research. The dialogue with FPE and decoloniality is continued in Chapter 12, which looks at how meanings flow between Western and Andean cultural horizons in urban environments marked by coloniality. The authors share elements from the Andean worldview from a decolonial perspective, inviting readers to consider Andean ways of understanding and feeling the relationship between the social and the natural as ways to learn about how to cope with social and environmental crises otherwise.

Continuing the engagement with open, pluriversal approaches to ecologies, Chapter 11 looks at ways to shape social and environmental futures not from a top-down technical or policy perspective but through a grounded engagement in the imagination and vision of market vendors in Mexico City. The author addresses energy in the future, learning from market women’s dreams and fears in order to arrive at otherwise ways to address energy transitions, unpacking the implications these visions may have for communities and environments. The chapter illustrates a feminist methodology that uses storytelling to build knowledge, working with communities’ own visions of their futures.

While the overall tenor of the book intends to be open, learn from difference and think positively about possibilities for the future, it is also evident that the contours of FPE have been shaped by contestation. Paying attention to what is uncomfortable and where emotions are sparked informs FPE as a vibrant and dynamic set of discourses. In Chapter 10 the authors candidly look at the difficult (and often avoided) topic of population in FPE reflecting on the responses to Donna Haraway’s (2016) call to ‘make kin not babies’. They speak of others (and their own) strong, even explosive, reactions to Haraway. The informal dialogue format allows the authors to map out, from both a personal and scholarly level, the contours of feminist thinking about the fraught topic of population growth and population control, using emotions as an entry point into academic and political debate.

Another strong and emotive theme throughout the book is the importance of care and its different (and contested) meanings in FPE theory and practice. Chapter 7 features an intergenerational discussion on meanings of care looking at care in relation to ethics, intersectional justice, feminism and environmental activism. It highlights how care in activism, teaching and research is part of FPE approaches to knowledge and politics from both a Global South and North perspective. The activist scholars in Chapter 8 look at how care is central to the move towards radical social, economic and environmental change in their reflections on FPE contributions to degrowth as an academic and activist movement. The authors converse on FPE perspectives on care with a feminist critique of the structural racial, gender and wider social inequalities perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. They consider, with examples from their own experiences with communities in both the Global South and North, how paying attention to care work and valuing care for humans and more-than-human others is crucial to building just, sustainable and convivial societies. A practical example of how care informs FPE practice and research is illustrated in Chapter 3. This chapter foregrounds how the authors cultivated care as they worked with communities to create an exhibition, paying attention to how the emotional and the embodied enter into scholar-activist encounters. Chapter 5 also shows how care is part of FPE theorising and practice in an examination of ageing experiences as relational processes that require an awareness of how the ethics of care is embodied in everyday practices. In the authors’ practice and research on ageing in two very different contexts, they analyse how ageing is part of dynamic socionatural relations, arguing that FPE needs a more careful awareness of ageing experiences.

Another important theme that flows through the book is relations with the more-than-human.

Chapter 6 explores the politics of interdependencies through situated entanglements with water. The authors set out how more-than-human interdependencies within FPE means starting from an understanding of relationality. Drawing on research with waters and communities in Maharashtra, India and the Tagus River in Spain, the chapter examines the co-constitution of embodied subjectivities with the more-than-human, addressing issues of well-being, illness and ecological change in contemporary waterscapes. The chapter’s discussions on the contradictions, tensions and ethical implications of situated more-than-human co-becomings is echoed in the dialogical debate around Andean ways of understanding territory in Chapter 12 and the tensions with a modern understanding of urban landscapes, which see nature as something to be exploited and extracted, erasing other culture’s meanings and understandings of living with the more-than-human.

These are some of, but by no means all, the main themes that inform how FPE emerges in the book. By highlighting multiple perspectives, contradictions, self-reflexivity, as well as the complexities of intergenerational and intersectional researcher-participant relations, the book shows how feminist research is a continuous learning and unlearning process. This includes navigating tensions between funding, research and praxis, method and theory, the known and unknown and sensing and feeling (sentipensar). Throughout the book the authors grapple with the tensions of doing research that meets the requirements of research institutions (the university space, the EU), while respecting different logics and world outlooks. There is a sense of excitement in doing FPE research which, as the different chapters show in creative and unexpected ways, opens questions and makes convergences in fields not previously considered. We hope that the multi-layered debate in the chapters around the diverse meanings, understandings and languages of FPE invites readers to think further about how to continue to shape the contours of FPE.

Where to Go from Here?

The book has set out how WEGO-ITNFootnote 1 has evolved through meaningful and careful research as the world faces ongoing climate crisis, the prospect of future pandemics, wars, economic and political uncertainty and reversals on gains made, including in the areas of gender equality, intersectional justice and human rights. We hope the book contributes to an understanding of how FPE can support our individual and collective resilience in the future.

The book illustrates the importance of innovation and adaptation to becoming experimental, creative and flexible in order to deal with individual, institutional and global uncertainties. It sets out how we are learning to cope in this new normal: pandemics, economic and social uncertainty and climate crisis. The quest is how to build relationships both virtually and in-place; politically and culturally that can shape FPE as a space for creative learning. We hope to ‘live the talk’ of a feminist network of transformation that centres relations of care as we look for alternatives to capitalism and mainstream development through engagement with communities.

This relational approach is a key dimension of FPE. While the hegemonic patriarchal mode of development is based on domination, conflict and exploitation (over bodies, cultures, nature), FPE promotes a transition based on the day-to-day practices of women, men, others and their communities to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods. The shaping of these livelihoods takes place within the tension between autonomous and diverse imaginaries and the impositions of capitalist globalisation. Imagining the lives and the worlds individuals and communities want to live in needs to happen outside the development discourse that has already imagined and determined the world for all of us. We hope the reader agrees that the book opens future possibilities on the basis of our collective research and encounters; our experimental and culturally anchored practices aimed at putting Life at the centre.