Toward a Feminist Ethic of Self-Care for Environmental Educators

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

Abstract

Feminist theory and philosophy have examined how dominant ideologies oppress women, nonhuman animals, and the environment. Feminist scholars also have begun to discuss how neoliberalism problematically re-inscribes women as the primary providers of care, regardless of the impact of this care work on their own wellbeing. Drawing on these theories, we ask what it means for environmental education teacher-scholar-activists to do the “everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other” (Ahmed, 2014, n. p.) to assemble the kinds of socioecologically just communities we desire. Because our life and teaching experiences are grounded in animal-focused education within environmental education, we use animal-focused education here as an exemplar to develop a feminist ethic of self-care for environmental educators. While environmental education scholars have discussed feminist ethics of care (McKenzie & Blenkinsop, 2006; Russell & Bell, 1996), their attention to self-care is non-existent or minimal, as we discuss in further detail. This paper, therefore, synthesizes feminist writings about temporality, relationality, and self-care alongside Foucault’s (2008) ideas about “care for self” and feminist environmental education scholarship that considers care in order to develop a feminist ethic of self-care for environmental educators that challenges neoliberal ideologies. This ethic acknowledges that women disproportionately bear the emotional costs of teaching, both because women make up the vast majority of educators in our contexts (e.g., United States Department of Labor, 2010) and because women tend to engage in caring labor and service-oriented tasks more often than men (Green, 2015; Misra, Lundquist, Holmes, & Agiomavritis, 2011). It also considers how animals (and the environment more broadly) are typically absent referents (Adams, 2002) in educational spaces, which means the burden of de-objectifying them falls on the shoulders of educators. And finally, it deliberately challenges neoliberal temporalities by calling for the creation of structural supports of time and space that value emotional expression in K-12 and post-secondary educational systems.

Authors

• Teresa Katrina Lloro-Bidart, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona

• Keri Semenko, Durham College