New vintages and new bottles: The “Nature” of environmental education from new material feminist and ecofeminist viewpoints

ABSTRACT

Fifteen years ago we explored the implications of adopting a poststructuralist feminist research methodology in environmental education research and practice. We argued that speaking the world into existence provides multiple ways of thinking about and comprehending environmental knowledge and the way we experience ourselves in space, time, and place. In the intervening years, feminist new materialism has emerged, ecofeminism has had an enlivening resurgence, feminist scholarship in environmental education has expanded, and “nature” seems to have declined within dominant discourses, supplanted by a more anthropocentric agenda. The positioning of body/nature in this scholarship has become a point of contention, difference, and convergence. Here, we explore the “nature” of environmental education as informed by new material feminist, ecofeminist, and other viewpoints, interrogating their similarities and differences, their relationship to feminist poststructuralism, and their implications for environmental education research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• ecofeminism
• environmental education
• nature
• new material feminism
• poststructuralism