Feminist Political Ecology

Armed Conflict, Gender and the Rights of Nature

Keina Yoshida

March 30, 2023

Snowden Auditorium, W01-0088 Wheatley Hall & Zoom webinar

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Topics

Personal Politics: Radical Feminism, Difference, and Anti-Nuclear Activism

Citation:

Harvey, Kyle. 2014. “Personal Politics: Radical Feminism, Difference, and Anti-Nuclear Activism.” In American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990, 68–92. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Author: Kyle Harvey

Abstract:

In the late 1970s, as the anti-nuclear movement began its large-scale revival, an array of women’s protest collectives and activist organizations formed, aiming to offer feminist perspectives on the nuclear threat and define an appropriate activist response. These new groups built upon, extended, and challenged the legacy of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), formed in 1915, Women Strike for Peace, formed in 1961, and a host of other women’s organizations and feminist groups involved tangentially in peace activism, women’s liberation, and related activity. In the 1980s, some female activists situated their peace protests within political and legislative institutions, drawing a great deal from the successes of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Others, more radical in their approach, used ideas about militarism, ecology, and personal expression to oppose nuclear arms as merely one of a myriad of crises threatening women the world over. Mirroring the meeting of women’s liberation and radical feminism in the late 1960s, these very different strands of feminist thought—and their expression within the anti-nuclear movement—reflect how much second-wave feminism changed during the 1970s. They also demonstrate the significance of the rise of cultural feminism in the 1970s and the subsequent marginalization of radical feminists from the wider women’s peace movement.

Topics: Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Peace and Security, Peacebuilding, Weapons /Arms Regions: Americas, North America Countries: United States of America

Year: 2014

How Women Can Save the Planet

Citation:

Karpf, Anne. 2021. How Women Can Save the Planet. Hurst Publishers.

Author: Anne Karpf

Annotation:

Summary: 
Here’s a perverse truth: from New Orleans to Bangladesh, women—especially poor women of colour—are suffering most from a crisis they have done nothing to cause. Yet where, in environmental policy, are the voices of elderly European women dying in heatwaves? Of African girls dropping out of school due to drought? Our highest-profile climate activists are women and girls; but, at the top table, it’s men deciding the earth’s future.
 
We’re not all in it together—but we could be. Instead of expecting individual women to save the planet, what we need are visionary, global climate policies that are gender-inclusive and promote gender equality.
 
Anne Karpf shines a light on the radical ideas, compelling research and tireless campaigns, led by and for women around the world, that have inspired her to hope. Her conversations with female activists show how we can fight back, with strength in diversity. And, faced with the most urgent catastrophe of our times, she offers a powerful vision: a Green New Deal for Women.

Topics: Environment, Climate Change, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality Regions: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe

Year: 2021

“Now We Have Equality”: A Feminist Political Ecology Analysis of Carbon Markets in Oaxaca, Mexico

Citation:

Gay-Antaki, Miriam. 2016. “‘Now We Have Equality’: A Feminist Political Ecology Analysis of Carbon Markets in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Geography 15 (3): 49–66.

Author: Miriam Gay-Antaki

Abstract:

Carbon projects follow a neoliberal logic that stresses that nature is best conserved via market mechanisms. Studies and experiences of the impacts of development projects on communities and feminist political ecologies suggest that women, the elderly, the young, the poor, and the indigenous often perceive projects differently, benefit and lose in different ways, or shape the projects on the ground to fit their needs. Carbon projects have differentiated impacts within a community especially on the poor, women, and ecology; however, these differences do not tend to be the main focus of scholarship. The research presented here focuses on the effects of a wind project and a small scale reforestation project and the convergence of environment, gender and development as these are introduced into communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. This paper expands on carbon offset literature in Mexico by looking at the differential impacts of technologies on geographies and people with specific attention to gender. I find that there are important gendered differences between the wind and the forest projects, and suggest that a Feminist Political Ecology perspective is a necessary, though infrequently employed, lens through which to understand the impacts of carbon markets.

Keywords: feminist political ecology, Oaxaca, carbon projects

Topics: Development, Environment, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Indigenous Regions: Americas Countries: Mexico

Year: 2016

Feminisms, the Environment and Capitalism: On the Necessary Ecological Dimension of a Critical Latin American Feminism

Citation:

Schild, Verónica. 2019. “Feminisms, the Environment and Capitalism: On the Necessary Ecological Dimension of a Critical Latin American Feminism.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 20 (6): 23–43.

Author: Verónica Schild

Abstract:

Latin American women are on the move today, taking their demands to the streets throughout the region in unprecedented numbers. What these demands reveal is a growing frustration and anger among women with the distance between official democratic promises and protections and the limited gains in basic rights, even the reversal of minimal achievements in places like Central America and Brazil. Feminists are weaving together different struggles into an intersectional movement explicitly linking gender demands to the end of a neoliberal capitalist model of development and its devastating social, economic and ecological effects on Latin America’s overwhelming majority. A critical Latin American feminism aimed at apprehending the present predicament of women in the region, I suggest, needs to extend its commitment to producing knowledge from below and to the left, by reaching further, and engaging critically with Marx and his feminist critics. Given the widespread impact of the present capitalist modernity, tethered to neo-extractivism, not only on the lives of peasant and indigenous Latin Americans but also of increasingly broader sectors of rural and urban society and in particular, on the lives of women, it is imperative that we understand the structural nature of the relation between women, capitalism and nature.

Topics: Development, Environment, Extractive Industries, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Rights

Year: 2019

Beyond Limits and Scarcity: Feminist and Decolonial Contributions to Degrowth

Citation:

Mehta, Lyla, and Wendy Harcourt. 2021. “Beyond Limits and Scarcity: Feminist and Decolonial Contributions to Degrowth.” Political Geography, May, 102411. doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102411.

Authors: Lyla Mehta, Wendy Harcourt

Annotation:

Summary:
"We welcome this opportunity to participate in this important dialogue between political ecology and degrowth. We bring to this debate two issues: (1) perspectives on limits and scarcity, and (2) the histories and knowledges of feminist political ecology and decolonial feminism as a way of enriching degrowth's political grammar and strategies" (Mehta & Harcourt 2021).
 
"We argue that degrowth needs to learn from feminist political ecology in how to imagine possible futures beyond the theories, policies, and practices of capitalist and socialist/state-capitalist growth. Changing our ways of thinking, and our desires, habits and ways of being with others, requires new relations of care. It is our common responsibility to care which is the political and substantive work of creating degrowth futures" (Mehta & Harcourt 2021).

Topics: Economies, Care Economies, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology

Year: 2021

Tigers and ‘Good Indian Wives’: Feminist Political Ecology Exposing the Gender-Based Violence of Human-Wildlife Conflict in Rajasthan, India

Citation:

Doubleday, Kalli F. 2020. “Tigers and ‘Good Indian Wives’: Feminist Political Ecology Exposing the Gender-Based Violence of Human-Wildlife Conflict in Rajasthan, India.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers: 1-19. 
 

Author: Kalli F. Doubleday

Keywords: conservation, feminist political ecology, gender-based violence, well-being

Annotation:

Summary:
This qualitative study, based on fifty-two focus groups, interviews, and participant observation within a 10-km buffer around Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, India, builds on Monica Ogra’s foundational work bringing together feminist political ecology and human–wildlife conflict studies. Specifically, it exposes gender-based violence as a hidden cost of the socioenvironmental network of the tiger reserve landscape. This study asks these questions: How do gendered geographies in and around a protected area influence tiger reintroduction, and how do tiger reintroductions influence gendered geographies? What is the nature of the relationships between women’s economic and gender roles and attitudes toward tigers (original and reintroduced), and what are the main factors influencing this relationship? This research finds that (1) gender-based violence is a hidden cost of women working in and around Sariska and the reintroduced tigers, a hidden cost of human–wildlife conflict otherwise unnoted in the literature, (2) this hidden cost is not solely the product of human–wildlife encounters but in large part a consequence of the highly patriarchal society that dictates gendered human–environmental relations. The results and presented framework seek to inform developing debates and theory around just conservation, gender-based violence in relation to environmental change, human dimensions of apex predator conservation, and sustainable rural livelihoods in and adjacent to protected areas. (Summary from original source)

 

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Gender Roles, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 2020

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