Reimagining intersectionality in environmental and sustainability education: A critical literature review

ABSTRACT

We seek to understand how issues of intersectionality are addressed in environmental and sustainability education (ESE) literature, focusing on how gender is discussed in relation to other social identities such as class, race, sexuality, and ability. Our analysis draws from feminist and decolonizing frameworks, and uses intersectionality to examine how ESE literature addresses issues as interconnected. Intersectional analysis originates from Black feminist perspectives on how social identities/subjectivities collide and collude to reproduce systemic and unique forms of oppression. This article contributes to this critical framework by incorporating considerations of Indigenous interconnectivity and land-based sovereignties. We begin this literature review by providing a background of intersectionality and interconnectivity from Black feminist and Indigenous knowledge systems, and describe how these frameworks inform our analysis. We then review existing ESE literature to critically examine how researchers have utilized feminist perspectives to discuss gender in relation to class, race, sexuality, body size, and ability as well as species. This review seeks to disrupt marginalization and calls for the use of critical frameworks such as intersectionality to deconstruct and disrupt oppression in ESE.

KEYWORDS:

• environmental education
• environmental and sustainability education
• gender
• interconnectivity
• intersectionality