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| Program > Environmental Epistemology |
| Programme > Épistémologie de l'environnement |
| Lorraine
Code
(York University) Knowing Ecologically : Feminist Theory and the Politics of Knowledge |
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In this paper I outline the potential of an ecologically modeled epistemology to disrupt a hegemonic social imaginary of domination and control. Ecological naturalism interrogates the instrumental rationality, abstract individualism, reductivism, and exploitation of people and places that scientistic epistemologies underwrite, to promote a social-political imaginary sensitive to human and geographical diversity, respectful of the natural world, and responsible in its democratic epistemic practices. Ecological thinking generates a freedom-enhancing conceptual apparatus that engages with feminist, multi-cultural, and other post-colonial issues to expose the local and global, human and environmental harms that epistemologies of mastery have enacted and to develop situated critiques of the imbrication of knowledge with power. I show this apparatus at work in the scientific practice of American naturalist Rachel Carson and Canadian biologist Karen Messing. And I argue that the feminist question "whose knowledge are we talking about?" when issues about public trust and responsibility both collective and individual displace quests for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge "in general". My larger claim, at which I can merely gesture here, is that despite the profusion of ecological discourses and despite contestations in the politics of ecology, the creative, restructuring possibilities of ecological thinking have yet to be realized. As humanism vied with theism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ecological thinking vies with capitalism in the twenty-first century: it engages so many interwoven, often contradictory issues - feminist, classist, environmental, post-colonial, homophobic, racist, sexist - that it requires multi-faceted chartings.
School
of Women Studies
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