Prelims

Half Title Page

Ecofeminism on the Edge

Series Page

WOMEN, ECONOMY AND LABOUR RELATIONS

Series Editor: Martina Topic, Leeds Beckett University, UK

This series aims to publish monographs and edited collections that tackle the position of women in the economy as well as explore labor relations. By labor relations, it means studying human relations in work in its broadest sense and analyzing how labor relations affect social inequality with particular reference to women. In terms of social inequality, this series particularly welcomes analyses of women and class and broader analyses of labor relations. The series will publish perspectives from around the world and thus the series fits into the understanding of labor relations through both work relations in a Western sense and non-Western forms of labor. The series is also interested in studies of the position of women in worker’s unions, the stance on women’s affairs within workers’ unions, and the position of women and women’s affairs in labor movements. Both historical and contemporary perspectives are welcome. Studies in industrial and economic sociology are particularly welcome.

The book series aims to publish books from a variety of perspectives, e.g., the series will equally accept both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Also, the book series will accept case study perspectives on women working in various industries. We would particularly like to hear from authors who research the position of women in working-class jobs, e.g., factory workers, supermarket workers, etc. Studies on women in feminized industries (e.g., nursing, teaching, PR) and masculine industries (construction, business, finance) are equally welcome. The main aim of this book series is to deconstruct women’s position in the economy and explore labor relations from a feminist perspective. All feminist perspectives are welcome, which includes liberal feminist perspectives, as well as analyses of the position of women from radical and socialist feminist positions. In the case of the latter, we particularly welcome proposals that tackle the economic system and inequalities with special reference to the position of women. The proposed books should particularly focus on analyzing structural problems that bring about inequality, the distinctiveness of women’s contributions to the economy, work conditions and masculinities in organizations and wider societies and differences between men and women. Besides, books that tackle economic systems and link this to the position of women are also welcome.

Title Page

Ecofeminism on the Edge: Theory and Practice

EDITED BY

GORAN ĐURĐEVIĆ

Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

and

SUZANA MARJANIĆ

Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Croatia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2024

Editorial Matter and Selection © 2024 Goran Đurđević and Suzana Marjanić.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

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ISBN: 978-1-80455-042-7 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80455-041-0 (Online)

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Contents

About the Editors

Goran Đurđević is a Croatian-born archaeologist and ancient environmental historian who works as a Lecturer at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He is educated in Croatia [BA and MA degrees in Archaeology and History (double major) at the University of Zadar], India (online PG Diploma in Comparative Mythology at Mumbai University), China (PhD degree in Archaeology from Capital Normal University in Beijing – thesis Reflection in Qin – Han and Roman Art: A Comparative Study of Ancient Mirrors, 2021, main supervisor: Ning Qiang), and the USA (one semester as visiting graduate researcher at the UCLA). Research interests are in three main foci: (a) global antiquities and comparative archaeology, (b) digital humanities, and (c) environmental humanities. Currently, he (co-)leads the digital humanities project Mirror Studies (www.mirrorstudies.com). Goran teaches courses in: Global Ancient Worlds, Empires: Comparative Perspectives, Environmental Humanities, and Digital Humanities. He was awarded by the Government of People’s Republic of China’s Ph.D. scholarship, outstanding student scholarship awarded by the Croatia Ministry of Science and Education, double Winner of Rector’s awards for academic years 2007/2008 and 2011/2012 at University of Zadar. He is also (co)author of four books (Shadows of Success: Essays About Education, Durieux, 2023; Reading Diary: Essays and Book Reviews, Durieux, 2022; co-authored with Z. Stopić, The Silk, Dragons and Paper: Chinese Archaeology, History, Culture and Civilization, Alfa, 2021; co-authored with J. Bešlić, V. Milković, J. Topić Seventy Years of Football Club Dinamo Vidovci Dervišaga, FC Dinamo Vidovci Dervišaga, 2016) in Croatian, then 5 edited volumes and 30 papers and book chapters published in Croatian, English, Spanish, Polish, Serbian, Russian, and Chinese.

Suzana Marjanić is on the staff at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb, where she researches theories of ritual and myth, critical animal studies and performance studies. She has published six books: Voices of “Bygone Days”: Transgressions of Worlds in Krleža’s Notes 1914–1921/22 (2005), Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art: From Traveleri Until Today (2014), The Topoi of Performance Art: A Local Perspective (2017), Myths and Re/Constructions: Tracing Natko Nodilo’s Old Faith of Serbs and Croats (2022), Performance Art and Cynicism: Performance Line of Resistance (2022) and Cetera animantia: ethnozoology to zooethics (2022). She co-edited eight collections, for instance the collection Ecofeminism: between Green and Women’s studies (2020) with Goran Đurđević and Cat-Collection from Bastet to Catwoman (2022) with Rosana Ratkovčić. The book The Chronotope of Croatian Performance Art: From Traveleri Until Today (2014), which is the first history of performance art in Croatia, won the Annual award for the Croatian Selection of AICA and the National Award for Science.

About the Contributors

Magdalena Bogusławska, University of Warsaw, Poland. She conducts research on Slavic Balkan countries in the fields of performatics and visual studies. She is interested in the phenomenon of “reclaiming” Slavic imaginarium from the perspective of identity discourses and practices and processes of globalization of symbolic codes. She is the author of scientific articles and books, among others: Teatr u źródeł. Teatr i dramat południowosłowiański wobec tradycji widowiskowych regionu; Warszawa 2006 (Theatre at Its Source. South Slavic Theatre and Drama in the Face of the Region’s Spectacular Traditions) and Obraz władzy we władzy obrazu. Artystyczne konceptualizacje wizerunku Josipa Broza Tity, Warszawa – Kraków 2015 (Image of Power in the Power of Image. Artistic Conceptualisations of the Image of Josip Broz Tito).

Sarah Czerny works at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. She is a Social Anthropologist who is interested in human–animal relations, with a particular interest in milk production and consumption. She has written the book Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks (Brill 2022). She is also interested in anthropological forms of knowledge production.

Lada Čale Feldman is Full Professor and Chair of Theatre Studies at the Department for Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb in Croatia. Her areas of research are theater and performance studies and feminist criticism. Her books in Croatian are Play-within-the-Play in the Croatian Theatre, Zagreb, 1997; Euridices Turns, 2001, Femina Ludens, 2005, Dreams Are Not to Be Trusted, 2012, and Beyond the Stage, 2019. She also co-authored In the Canon, Essays in Doubling in 2008 (with M. Čale) and Introduction to Feminist Criticism in 2012 (with A. Tomljenović); she co-edited several special issues of journals and numerous collections, among which in English (with I. Prica and R. Senjković), Fear, Death and Resistance: Croatia 1991–1992, 1993. and (with M. Blažević) Misperformance: Essays in Shifting Perspectives, 2014. She is also the recipient of following awards: “Petar Brečić” in 2002, “Martin Stevens” in 2005, the Annual Award of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2009, and “Marko Fotez” in 2022.

Marija Geiger Zeman, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist in Sociology at the Institute of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar in Zagreb (Croatia). Geiger Zeman is the author of many papers and conference presentations focused on gender issues, media (COVID-19, fake news, etc.), and age issues. Her empirical work is based on qualitative methodology. In 2010, Geiger Zeman received the Annual Science Award by the Croatian Parliament in the field of social sciences.

Nataša Govedić, PhD, is a writer, poet, critic, Croatian theater and film scholar who regularly contributes to the fields of adaptation studies, Shakespeare studies, feminism, performance ethics, and communal theater. She is employed as a Full-Time Lecturer at Academy for Drama (Zagreb), while she also works as Editor-in-chief of the academic journal TRECA, Theatre Critic in the daily newspaper NOVI LIST, Guest-Lecturer at Peace studies Zagreb, Guest-Lecturer at Faculty of Teacher Education, etc. So far, she has published 15 scholarly books on theater and performance (most recent are Style for a Style: Transgressive Methodology of Adaptation, 2021 and Oscar Wilde Walks Out of the Prison House or Your Favorite Art is Called Criticism, 2022), but also various fictional books and poetry. She is also active as theater dramaturg and/or performer.

Maryse Helbert, University of Groningen (Netherlands). After obtaining her PhD at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Maryse held a writing fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environmental and Society in Munich, Germany, and then a Postdoctoral position at the International Institute for Social Studies at The Hague in the Netherlands. She is now a Lecturer at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Ecofeminist, she has been exploring socio-ecological transformations and articulations required for a just society beyond the unsustainable practices of patriarchal-colonial-capitalism.

Mirela Holy, PhD, is a Professor of Ethnology and Comparative Literature. She works at the VERN’ University in Zagreb as Head of three graduate studies, and one undergraduate study. She has published six books and many articles about the environment, human rights, and communication. She received the Miko Tripalo Award for outstanding contribution to the society’s democratization and promotion of human rights in 2012.

Sandra Iršević, Ph.D. student, University Educons, Belgrade (Serbia). Iršević (1973) is a Journalist from Subotica. She has been the Editor-in-chief of the independent informative portal Ecofeminism.com (www.ecofeminizam.com) since 2016, and a Correspondent for TV Pink since 2019. She has a Master’s degree in Communication (Singidunum Faculty of Media and Communication) and is a Doctoral candidate in Digital Production at EducOn University. She has been working in journalism since 1998 and has worked in television, print, radio, and online portals. She started her career at Subotica News, continued at Dani magazine, and from 2000 to 2015, she worked at the local television station YUECO in Subotica. She was a journalist, editor, author, and host of the show The Face of Subotica (15 years) and On the Trail (6 years). From 2009 to 2019, she was a Correspondent for the Vojvodina newspaper Dnevnik, as well as national newspapers such as Nase Novine, Informer, and others. From 2015 to 2019, she worked in the Subotica RT Vojvodina correspondence in the Serbian language, and from 2019 to the present, she has been working at RTV Pink. Since 2004, in cooperation with civil society organizations and institutions, she has been a Collaborator on domestic and international projects and the author of several series of radio and television shows and news series on various topics supported by the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia, the Provincial Secretariat for Environmental Protection, the Secretariat of the City of Pancevo for Ecology, the City of Subotica, and contests organized by journalist associations in cooperation with foreign donors. She is a recipient of the Siemens Press Awards 2014, and she won third place and the annual award for tolerance given by the Republic Gender Equality Commissioner and the OSCE Mission to Serbia in 2015 for the article “Female Farmers without Labor Rights.” She is a trainer in environmental, gender equality, and human rights workshops for primary and secondary school students.

Clara Esteve-Jordà holds a PhD in environmental law. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain. She is also an associate researcher at the Tarragona Centre for Environmental Law Studies (CEDAT) and a regular contributor to the Catalan Journal of Environmental Law. Apart from ecofeminist theories and movements, her areas of interest are property rights and the commons, environmental movements, environmental justice and comparative constitutional law.

Tara Kalaputi, Independent Researcher, Skopje (North Macedonia). Kalaputi holds a BA in English language and literature and an MA in Human Rights and Democracy in South-Eastern Europe. For her MA thesis, she conducted research on the detention of unaccompanied children on the move in Bulgaria. Her academic work includes topics related to migration and feminism and her professional expertise is children protection, migration, and emergency preparedness and response.

Barbara Martinović earned her Bachelor’s (2012) and Master’s degrees (2014) in Art History and Croatian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina). In 2023, she completed PhD in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Osijek (Croatia) with a doctoral thesis The Relation of Image and Word in Visual Arts From a Feminist Perspective. Since 2015, she has been a teaching professional at the University of Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in the Art History Department. Her main interests are studies of image and word, contemporary art, feminist art, and ecocriticism.

Bénédicte Meillon, University of Perpignan (France). Meillon is Associate Professor at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia. She has completed her Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. She leads OIKOS, the UPVD ecopoetics cross-disciplinary research workshop, and has created an Internet platform dedicated to ecopoetics (https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org). She is Vice President of EASCLE. She has recently published a monograph titled Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). She has co-edited, with Dr Margot Lauwers, a special issue of Crossways Journal: Lieux d’enchantement: approches écocritiques et écopoét(h)iques des liens entre humains et non-humains (2018). She has directed a volume on Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth (Lexington Books, 2020), and has also co-edited two transdisciplinary issues of Textes & Contextes on the reenchantment of urban wildness: the first, with Rachel Bouvet and Marie-Pierre Ramouche, dealing with eco- and geo-poetic approaches (June 2021) and the second, codirected with Sylvain Rode and Hélène Schmutz, with contributions in the Environmental Humanities (Nov 2021). She has been engaged in creative projects mobilizing arts and performance as a way to restore ecological attention. She is currently leading Sea More Blue, a research program on blue ecopoetics that braids ecological arts, humanities, and sciences.

Brigita Miloš, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka, and the Centre for Women’s Studies Coordinator at Rijeka’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She researches in the fields of gender studies, feminism, and literature. Miloš published more than 20 articles in her research fields. She co-edited the gender studies textbook Introduction to Gender Studies – From Theory to Engagement (Uvod u studije roda-od teorije do angažmana).

Joy Ogbemudia is a Senior Lecturer in the Leadership, Governance and People Management subject group at Leeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University, United Kingdom. She specializes in Human Resource Management, Gender, Migration studies, and Diversity Management. A prolific academic with a BA in English Language, MSc in Human Resource Management, and a PhD in Women’s Studies. Joy is the author of the book The Migration of Professional Women from Nigeria to the UK: Narratives of Work, Family Life and Adaptation.

Jadranka Ryle, Independent Researcher (United Kingdom/Croatia). Ryle holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from the University of Manchester. She has published recent research articles on modern and contemporary art, feminism, and early abstraction. Since graduating she has worked as a Freelance Curator and Independent Researcher, as well as a Full-Time Cultural Centre Manager. Currently, she is working on a research project about digital archives, feminism, animal studies, and contemporary comic artists in Croatia.

Ariel Salleh, Nelson Mandela University (South Africa) and University of Sydney (Australia). Salleh is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Centre on Labour, Sustainability, and Global Production, Queen Mary University of London; a Member of the Global University for Sustainability, Hong Kong; and Visiting Professor in Humanities, Nelson Mandela University. She is a former Associate in Political Economy, University of Sydney and Senior Fellow in PostGrowth Societies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena: www.arielsalleh.info. Her books include Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (1997/2017); EcoSufficiency & Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology (2009); and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary co-edited with Ashish Kothari, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria & Alberto Acosta (2019). Salleh’s focus on regenerative labor in the world system offers a new class analysis by re-locating “value” in caregiving skills and Indigenous knowledge. This “embodied materialism” reads feminist, decolonial, socialist, and ecological movements as a unified transversal political ecology. Her theoretical work builds on anti-nuclear, water, and bio-diversity activism. She has served on the International Sociological Association Research Committee for Environment and Society; the Australian Government’s Gene Technology Ethics Committee; and was a Founding Editor of the journal Capitalism, Nature Socialism.

Martina Topić is a Behavioral Sociologist and a Mass Communications Scholar. She is currently a Reader at Leeds Beckett University, UK. She is an author and a lead of the EUPRERA Network on Women in PR and a Research Lead for the #WECAN project (Women Empowered Through Coaching and Networking) funded by the UK Government and the European Social Fund. She is an author of Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Affairs in the British Press: An Ecofeminist Critique of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2021) and Comms Women Initiative Promoting and Celebrating Achievements of Women Working in Mass Communications Industries.

Karen Vollum-Dix (was Trem), Leeds Beckett University (United Kingdom). Karen’s first degree was in Mechanical Engineering, followed by an early career in the manufacturing industry. This was followed by a period as a management consultant, both self-employed and as an employee, then director with a small consultancy business. A significant amount of work during this time was management and organizational development supporting business growth and culture change. The next move was into education, working in Higher Education, mainly teaching at Master’s level. Moving to Leeds Beckett University in 2011, Karen has taught on a range of different courses and modules, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, particularly enjoying time spent teaching in Southern Africa. Current teaching is mainly focused on the preparation of undergraduate students for employment. Research interests are (i) values in an organizational context; phenomenography; ecofeminism; duoethnography; diversity & inclusivity (race and gender perspectives) and (ii) application of machine learning and artificial intelligence in people management; approaches to teaching and learning in university student engagement.

Ana Vukmanović, Independent Researcher, Belgrade (Serbia). Vukmanović got her Master’s degree in socio-cultural anthropology from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade (thesis: Water in ritual-mythic context of folk lyric) and PhD from the Faculty of Philology (dissertation: Meanings and functions of boundary in wedding oral lyric). She was in Zagreb (Croatia) for a one-month research stay at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research in 2018. In the winter semester of 2018/2019, she was a Visiting Scholar and Lecturer of the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian language at the Institute for Slavic Studies, University of Cologne. She published a book In Search of Spring-Water. Images of Water in South Slavic Oral Lyric Poetry. She participated in a number of conferences in Serbia and abroad and published papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. Her spheres of interest are folkloristics, poetics of oral lyric poetry, anthropology and poetics of space, and alterity studies in oral lyric poetry.

Foreword to the Book: Why Do We Need Ecofeminism?

“…it is impossible, within patriarchy, to suppress a market economy. And it is impossible, in a market system, to not devastate the planet. It is up to women, now, to reclaim the voice of humanity…” (d'Eaubonne, [1990]1997: 4)

The poignant quote above, from one of the mothers of ecofeminism, outlines what this form of feminism is about. It is a distinctive position to feminist research that, unlike many other approaches, tries to speak to everyone, women, indigenous people and ethnic minorities, those suffering discrimination because of their social class, speciesism, etc. It does so by focusing on the critique of capitalism and the environmental destruction capitalism inevitably brings, regardless of what proponents of the so-called green capitalism say (Topić, 2021), but it puts women at the center of ecological struggle and also tackles technology as an issue in environmental protection. In addition to that, ecofeminism speaks of speciesism which is seen as part of the masculine ideology where humanity dominates the planet first through speciesism and this discrimination then cascades down to enforce the domination of genders, races, and classes through anthropocentrism (Topić, 2021; Warren, 1990; Alloun, 2015; Mayer, 2006; Iovino, 2013; Bahofen, 1990; Holy, 2007). In a nutshell, ecofeminism tackles -isms: racism, sexism, and speciesism and it is an anti-capitalist critique of economic and social conditions that lead to the inequality of races, species, and women (Salleh, 2000). In that, ecofeminism celebrates women's role in preserving the environment and there are many studies outlining the historical role of women in the environmentalist movement (Mallory, 2006; Brownhill and Turner, 2020; Goldstein, 2006; Holy, 2007; Leahy, 2003; McStay and Dunlap, 1983).

As a movement, ecofeminism generally celebrates women and their differences and diversity, including criticism of the so-called women male dealers or those who embrace masculinity and join the masculine world, thus leaving the majority of women behind. Some women are indeed tougher than men and work hard to abandon any association with femininity such as proving that they are not soft, emotional and can get the job done, thus they can be found as successful in open markets, armed forces and military interventions, etc. (Brownhill and Turner, 2020). In my own research into women in mass communication industries, advertising, public relations and media, this proved to be the case and I used the concept of blokishness to argue that only blokish women, or those who embrace masculine characteristics, succeed in the organizational life of mass communication industries and go ahead in their careers. Some of these masculine characteristics include aggression, boldness, directness, competence, toughness, competitiveness, tomboy upbringing, not being a woman's woman or a girly girl, etc. (Topić, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c; Topić and Bruegmann, 2021; Mills, 2014).

In other words, the problem is not in men per se but a masculine identity which is conceptualized and defined, in patriarchy, with domination and conquering and this includes nature, women and those perceived as others such as non-white races, for example. While studying discrimination is not new, ecofeminism opposes the separation of humanity from nature, thus offering a distinctive critique and an empirical tool to study inequality because ecofeminism speaks of interconnectedness between nature and developing new relationships based on ecological responses (Donovan, 1990). According to ecofeminists, humans should be one with nature, however, “capitalist patriarchal economies rest heavily on a profound human alienation from nature, one that is generated in the exploitation of people's labour and resources” (Canavan et al., 2010: 184). Therefore, ecofeminists often express criticism of technology as a fundamentally masculine way of controlling nature and further damaging the planet, thus arguing that the survival of humans is threatened despite masculine advances in industrialization and technology. Some ecofeminists argued that “it is continually assumed that the economic ‘costs’ are limited to some lost growth within continued growth and that innovation and technological change (‘progress’) will be sources of solutions to any given environmental problem” (Gills and Morgan, 2020: 6, emphasis in the original). For example, geoengineering is an attempt to control nature through technological intervention, with technology meddling in Earth's processes to reverse climate change such as Carbon Dioxide Removal (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), iron fertilization of oceans (to increase the production of algae blooms) and Solar Radiation Management (to reflect sun's rays back into space to reduce temperatures) (Sikka, 2017; Hulme, 2014; Preston, 2012). Buck et al. (2014) argued that most of the demographic pushing for this agenda is male, thus also anthropocentric and with an instrumentalist view of nature, which fits into the “masculine temperament of abstraction, objectivity, precision and calculation” (p. 653). Thus, a critique of capitalism is needed because

[…] market mechanisms and the logic of capitalism in the form of an expansionary capital accumulation system. By default, it leads to a de-emphasis of the positive or even necessary role for prohibitions, large scale state intervention, government planning, and regulation, in halting and reversing material expansion. Moreover, it entirely ignores radical social change organized “from below” (substituting for this the green consumer). (Gills and Morgan, 2020: 6)

Therefore, as humans, we have a fragmented and hierarchical relationship with nature “rooted in a culture where science and technology are posited as the epitome of reason in contract with pre-modernity, which was centred around nature, myth and religion” (Cross, 2008: 29). A part of the rise of modernity and growth of science and scientific reasoning led by “a masculine way of thinking of the world” (Bordo, 1986: 441) is connected to Cartesian dualistic objectivism, which resulted in an instrumental role of nature where humanity denies its connection with nature and attempts to dominate it instead (Singer, 2002). This is an anthropocentric position toward nature where humans are seen as having the right to exploit nature and the planet because they see themselves as at the center of the universe (Godfrey, 2008).

What is particularly relevant for ecofeminism is the notion that women and men are fundamentally different and act differently from one another (Scharff, 1995). This is one area that has not been enormously explored despite its research potential. I have done some work in this area, for example by looking at how women lead eco-villages (Topić, 2020) and by analyzing the press' writing on economic growth, global warming, food waste, corporate social responsibility and plastic (Topić, 2021). In the first case, I looked at whether women founded eco-villages, and if so, which values are these villages founded on, whether the vision and philosophy of eco-villages are at least partially founded on the values of ecofeminism, which are anti-hierarchy, equality, collectivism, and whether there are differences between villages founded by women and those founded by men. In the case of the latter, I looked at how journalists write about economic growth and environmental affairs, who writes about it, whether there is a problem with speciesism, whether technology is presented as a solution to environmental problems, and whether there is a prevalent masculine view of economic growth and environmental affairs. In both studies, I found differences between men and women, as per ecofeminist theory, and fundamentally different points of view. In eco-villages research, the findings have shown that eco-villages formed by women tend to have less hierarchy, more collectivism and higher equality while eco-villages formed by men tend to have more hierarchy and are more inclined to have some form of capitalist rule (Topić, 2020). In research on the environmental affairs in the British press, it turned out that women have merged into the masculine culture of newsrooms, a finding well-known from journalism research (Mills, 2014; Topić and Bruegmann, 2021) and write in a masculine way advocating for economic growth, but they still do so to a lesser extent than men thus opening a question what would happen if more women joined politics and economics, two prestigious beats in journalism traditionally occupied by male journalists (Topić, 2021).

Therefore, why do we need to study ecofeminism? Or is ecofeminism still alive, as the editors of this book ask? It is not as alive as other forms of feminism, and it cannot be called mainstream in feminist research. What is more, some see it as a relic of the past but this form of feminist inquiry has been revived by some of us who have started to use it to study inequality, myself and editors of this book, authors from several countries who contributed chapters, and main authors and mothers of ecofeminism such as Ariel Salleh, also an author in this book, still write and live this philosophy. However, the reason we need to revive it and work harder to make it visible and more popularized is because this form of feminism focuses on studying and celebrating women, first and foremost, in all of their diversity, thus ecofeminism is inclusive, diverse and speaks to everyone. What is more, it is a form of feminism that can be operationalized in empirical research so that ecofeminists like me, who are trained as social scientists, can use it without losing anything from their original training. Ecofeminism also bridges disciplines and belongs to nobody in particular but to everyone in general.

In this book, editors used ecofeminism to explore theories and discourse, art and practices, thus using ecofeminist framework to bridge disciplines with a total of 16 papers written by 21 authors from Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, France, the Netherlands, Northern Macedonia, Serbia, Spain, and the UK. In the first part, on theories and discourses, chapters provide ecofeminist readings of media studies, anthropology and environmental humanities, looking at issues such as political and eco oppression, media representation of ecofeminist audiences, ecofeminist aspects of Slavic gymnastics for women, relationship with animals and ecocriticism and ecofeminism. In the arts section, chapters elaborate on literature, fairy tales, films, and visual art. In the third section, chapters talk about ecofeminism and women's position in Bolivian society and Nigerian rural areas, as well as ecofeminist readings of law and Anthropocene, creative work and women and ecofeminism from the perspective of one of its mothers, Ariel Salleh. The chapters, with so many topics and disciplinary perspectives, demonstrate the value of this theoretical and philosophical framework, and along with my social science approach to ecofeminism, show that ecofeminism is far from dead and should be promoted and used more because only an approach that tries to speak to everyone and that looks at structural inequalities and goes deeper than men versus women dichotomy can help us understand and address the most pressing issues of today, including the climate change that threatens us all. In the world of climate change, what approach could tackle this better than the one that takes inequality between humanity and nature as its central point of epistemological and philosophical inquiry?

Dr Martina Topić

Department of Advertising and PR, College of Communication and Information Sciences, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA