Ecofeminist Imaginings: Storytelling and Dialogue as Lived Politics for Environmental Educators in Academia

• In Event: 52.065 - Moving Gender From Margin to Center in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

During this time of ecological crises, ecofeminist theory and practice is essential in helping us to challenge ecological and social injustice. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct our own environmental education practices within the academy through a critical ecofeminist lens, and in so doing, illustrate the utility and vitality of ecofeminist frameworks. Toward this end, we first unpack the critique of essentialism that has had a silencing and divisive effect on the field of ecofeminism (Carlassare, 1993; Gaard, 2011; Godfrey, 2005; Mann, 2006). We re-orient away from essentializing or discrediting ecofeminist work in a way that learns from the critiques, but is not paralyzed by them. Our re-orienting of ecofeminism turns toward a “continual reflexivity” (Ahmed, 1998) that sees ecofeminism as importantly intersectional, complex, and also vital to the work of questioning and mitigating our destructive relations with the natural world (Adams & Gruen, 2014; Plumwood, 1993, 1994). The bulk of our paper uses this intersectional understanding of ecofeminism to analyze two narratives based on our personal experience as environmental educators in the academy. Framing these narratives as a type of lived politics (Mallory, 2010), our analysis found two key challenges and possibilities common to both experiences. First, an ecofeminist lens helped us identify an ongoing challenge: the pervasiveness of anthropocentric tendencies to devalue and/or ignore more-than-human voices/concerns, even in environmental education contexts (Bell & Russell, 2000). Second, our separate attempts to live out an ecofeminist politic as environmental educators revealed a common possibility: dialogical and storytelling practices that express subjectivity, value, voice, and a politicized ethic of care with the more-than-human. The unpacking of ecofeminism's history and the use of an ecofeminist lens to analyze our experience allows us to (re)imagine what is possible and powerful in our environmental education practice.

Authors

• Laura Piersol, Simon Fraser University

• Nora Timmerman, Northern Arizona University