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The Covid-19 pandemic threw into stark relief the multi-dimensional threats created by neoliberal capitalism. Government measures to alleviate the crisis were largely inadequate, leaving women – in particular working-class women – to carry the increased burden of care work while at the same time placing themselves in direct risk as frontline workers. Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19, the seventh volume in the Democratic Marxism series, explores how many subaltern women – working class, peasant and indigenous – challenge hegemonic neoliberal feminism through their resistance to ordinary capitalist practices and ecological extractivism. Contributors cover women’s responses in a wide range of contexts: from women leading the defence of Rojava – the Kurdish region of Syria, to approaches to anti-capitalist ecology and building food secure pathways in communities across Africa, to championing climate justice in mining affected communities and transforming gender divisions in mining labour practices in South Africa, to contesting macro-economic policies affecting the working conditions of nurses. Their practices demonstrate a feminist understanding of the current systemic crises of capitalism and patriarchal oppression. What is offered in this collection is a subaltern women’s grassroots resistance focused on advancing and enabling solidarity-based political projects, deepening democracy, building capacities and alliances to advance new feminist alternatives.

Corporate engagements with pressing environmental challenges focus on expanding the role of the market, seeking opportunities for growth and developing technologies to manage better environmental resources. Such approaches have proved ineffective. I suggest that a lack of meaningful response to ecological degradation and climate change is inevitable within a capitalist system underpinned by a logics of appropriation and an instrumental rationality that views the planet as a means to achieve economic ends. For ecofeminism, these logics are promulgated through sets of hierarchical and interrelated dualisms which define the human in opposition to the realm of \"nature\". This has led to the resilience of ecosystems, social reciprocity and care being unvalued or undervalued. An ecofeminist, care-sensitive ethics is proposed that focuses on the interconnections between human and nonhuman nature and on affective engagements with the living world. A practical morality is developed that sees the self not as atomized nor as self-optimizing, but as a self in relationship. Such an ethics is necessary to motivate action to contest capitalism's binary thinking, evident within corporate environmentalism, which has re-made the web of life in ways that are not conducive to planetary flourishing.

Destined to transform its field, this volume features some of the most exciting feminist scholars and activists working within feminist political ecology, including Giovanna Di Chiro, Dianne Rocheleau, Catherine Walsh and Christa Wichterich. Offering a collective critique of the 'green economy', it features the latest analyses of the post-Rio+20 debates alongside a nuanced reading of the impact of the current ecological and economic crises on women as well as their communities and ecologies. This new, politically timely and engaging text puts feminist political ecology back on the map.

Coalitions and alliances exemplify the core elements of conflict and cooperation in animal societies. Ecological influences on alliance formation are more readily attributed to within-species variation where phylogenetic signals are muted. Remarkably, male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia, exhibit systematic spatial variation in alliance behavior, not simply within a species or population, but within a single social network. Moving SE-NW along Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay, males ally more often in trios than pairs, consort females more often, and exhibit greater seasonal movements. Ecological models predict more male-male conflict in the north, but sufficient observations of aggression are lacking. However, dolphins often incur marks, in the form of tooth rakes, during conflicts. Here we report that the incidence of new tooth rake marks varies systematically in the predicted pattern, with greater marking in the north, where males form more trios and consort females at a higher rate. While our previous work demonstrated that alliance complexity has an ecological component, we can now infer that ecological variation impacts the level of alliance-related conflict in Shark Bay.

Pastoral social-ecological systems (SES) provide myriad benefits to humanity and face multiple challenges in the 21st century, including interacting climate and land-use change, political marginalization, and demographic shifts, leading to loss of traditional knowledge and practices associated with sustainable use. Research and policy increasingly recognize women's roles in sustaining pastoral SES in the Global South, yet women pastoralists in the Global North have received scant attention. In Spain, like other countries in the Global North, the rise of intensive industrialized agriculture contributed to rural depopulation, land abandonment, and the masculinization of rural spaces. In this qualitative study, we address the empirical gap in studies of women pastoralists in the Global North by investigating Spanish women pastoralists' roles in pastoral SES conservation, adaptive transformation, and abandonment (regime shift). Drawing on in-depth life-history interviews with 31 women from 4 regions of Spain, and participatory workshops with women in each region, we explored women pastoralists' diverse identities and roles in conserving, transforming, and abandoning pastoral SES, focusing on 3 levels of social organization: the household/enterprise and local community, the extensive livestock sector, and society broadly. We found that women contributed to all three processes and we highlight synergies between women's roles as tradition-keepers and change agents that could serve as a leverage point for adaptive transformation. Our analysis also revealed key contradictions in women's material and discursive practices; how these are shaped by intersecting axes of social differences such as age, class, origins. and family status; and their implications for policy and practice to foster adaptive transformation of extensive livestock systems. This work advances SES/resilience research by addressing social science critiques of resilience approaches through the application of feminist theories and methodology that center the voices and subjective lived experiences of women pastoralists and attend to the roles of gender and power in SES dynamics.

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures.

Ecofeminism is for those who desire to improve their understanding of the current crises of poverty, environmental destruction, violence, and human rights abuses, and their causes. It is an ecofeminist analysis of modern society's dualized, patriarchal structure, showing that one-sided reductionist, masculine, and quantitative (yang) perceptions inform science, economics, and technology, resulting in subordination of holistic, feminine, and qualitative (yin) values. This yin-yang imbalance manifests as patriarchal domination of women, poor people, and nature, leading to the above crises. Since similar values inform Third World Development, its activities are also exploitative. Thus, rather than improving human well-being, development increases poverty and natural degradation in the South. Modern patriarchy manifests in neo-liberal policies that promote \"free\" global economic markets and trades, generating huge profits to the political and economic elites with devastating results for societies and nature worldwide. Unless we increase our awareness and demand changes that balance the yang and yin forces, patriarchal domination will eradicate life on planet Earth.

We tested a feminist social-ecological model to understand community influences on daughters' experience of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGMC) in Egypt, where over 90% of women ages 15-49 are cut. FGMC has potential adverse effects on demographic and health outcomes and has been defined as a human-rights violation. However, an integrated multilevel-level framework is lacking. We theorized that a more favorable community-level gender system, including stronger gender norms opposing FGMC and expanded extra-familial opportunities for women in the village or neighborhood, would be associated with a daughter's lower risk of FGMC and would strengthen the negative association of a mother's opposition to FGMC with her daughter's risk of cutting. Using a national sample of 14,171 mother-daughter dyads from the 2014 Egypt Demographic and Health Survey, we estimated multilevel discrete-time hazard models to test these relationships. Community gender norms opposing FGMC had significant direct, negative associations with the hazard that a daughter was cut, but women's opportunities outside the family did not. Maternal opposition to FGMC was negatively associated with cutting a daughter, and these associations were stronger where community opposition to FGMC and opportunities for women were greater. Results provided good support for a gender-systems framework of the multilevel influences on FGMC. Integrated, multilevel interventions that address gender norms about FGMC and structural opportunities for women in the community, as well as beliefs about the practice among the mothers of at-risk daughters, may be needed for sustainable declines in the practice.

Although improving both the ecological and social conditions of agriculture are central pillars of agroecology, emerging empirical research has focused largely on exploring its ecological contributions. Key among the less studied social aspects is gender (in)equity. Drawing data from northern Malawi, this paper investigates the relationship between agroecology and women’s autonomy in smallholder farming households. Overall, our findings showed participatory agroecology with a gender transformative lens can promote women’s autonomy. Although there was no observed significant difference in women’s autonomy at the baseline, women in agroecology practicing households (β = 0.20, p < 0.05) had significantly higher autonomy than their counterparts in non-agroecology households at the endline. These findings suggests that the broader gender-transformative praxis of agroecology which emphasizes the engagement of both men and women in deliberative dialogue and community-led education on social inequalities can contribute to improving household gender relations. In the context of widespread gender inequality in sub-Saharan Africa, and the limits these inequalities have on agricultural development, our findings provide promising entry points for development policy and the emerging sub-field of feminist agroecology.

The commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) are abusive and exploitative practices occurring to children and youth across the United States. Prevention efforts should understand the factors that increase vulnerability and how these factors interact to eventually lead to exploitation. Understanding the mechanisms of action of these factors is best done within relevant frameworks and models. This review summarizes proposed frameworks for these vulnerabilities as collected via a systematic literature review. Fifteen studies capturing 12 frameworks or theories were selected for inclusion having met the following criteria: original research studies published in English from January 2010 to September 2017 with titles or abstracts that indicated a focus on the risk factors, vulnerabilities, or statistics of CSEC/DMST; a domestic focus on CSEC/DMST (for U.S.-based journals) with findings that did not combine associations between minors and adults in the study; and inclusion or mention of frameworks or theories which considered potential vulnerabilities prior to exploitation. Highly applicable frameworks include the life-course perspective, ecological model, multilevel model, ecodevelopment model, traumagenic factors, and general strain theory. Others found by this review include the age-graded theory of informal social control, career criminal paradigm, revictimization theory, an economic model, feminist theory, and a rights-based model. By mapping known risk factors to their appropriate place in the reviewed and relevant frameworks, this article seeks to enhance our understanding of the connections between and mechanisms of these risk factors, while also clarifying areas where prevention efforts can be targeted.