Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Shorelines, Seashells, and Seeds: Feminist Epistemologies, Ecological Thinking, and Relational Ontologies

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief sketch of feminist epistemologies, their earlier iterations, and their contributions to relational epistemologies and methodologies, while also highlighting how they have sown the seeds for continuing feminist contributions to relational dimensions of knowledge making. It engages, through diffractive readings, with some of the work of pioneering and leading feminist epistemologist Lorraine Code and her four-decade trajectory of writing on knowledge making, subjectivities, and epistemic responsibilities, and especially her recent writing on ecological thinking. I work with Code’s metaphorical and literal ecological examples—Deleuzian ethology, a case study of Rachel Carson, and an exploration of seeds and their socio-cultural roots. I argue that these metaphors work to demonstrate how Code challenges dominant approaches to knowledge making that separate epistemology and ontology and presents ecological thinking as an alternative approach that entangles politics, ethics, epistemology, and ontology as well as knowing, being, and doing. The chapter highlights some of the methodological implications of working with ecological thinking; specifically, ecological thinking offers insights about epistemological and ontological relationality that resonates with, but also expands, current sociological methodological approaches and relational sociology. These include making shifts from reflexivity to diffraction and from interaction to intra-action ; a focus on vitality and processes of becoming; and thinking through our ontological underpinnings, including what it means to work with ontological alterity and ontological multiplicities. I argue that Code’s ecological thinking approach warrants more attention within relational sociology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237–264. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter. 1993. Introduction: When Feminisms Intersect Epistemology. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 1–14. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantam Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad. In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Michigan: Open Humanities Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell, Vikki. 2012. Declining Performativity: Butler, Whitehead and Ecologies of Concern. Theory, Culture & Society 29 (2): 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276412438413.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. Feminism and Postmodernism. In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell, and N. Fraser, 17–34. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blaser, Mario. 2010. Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. The Political Ontology of Doing Difference … and Sameness: Theorizing the Contemporary, January 13. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/474-the-political-ontology-of-doing-difference-and-sameness

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. The Science of Science and Reflexivity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic J.D. Wacquant. 1993. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Braidotti, Rosi. 2016a. The Posthuman. London: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016b. Posthuman Feminist Theory. In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Campbell, Richard. 1998. Illusions of Paradox. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carson, Rachel. 1951. The Sea Around Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1955. The Edge of the Sea. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1956. Biological Sciences. In Good Reading. New York: New American Library.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Code, Lorraine. 1981. Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant? Metaphilosophy 12: 267–276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9973.1981.tb00760.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1983. Responsibility and the Epistemic Community: Women’s Place. Social Research 50: 537–555.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1987. Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover: University Press of New England and Brown University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1991. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1995. Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1996. What Is Natural about Epistemology Naturalized? American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/20009844.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. How to Think Globally: Stretching the Limits of Imagination. Hypatia 13 (2): 73–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008a. Thinking About Ecological Thinking. Hypatia 23 (1): 187–203. https://doi.org/10.2307/25483158.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008b. Thinking Ecologically About Biology. Insight 1 (7): 2–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. ‘They Treated Him Well’: Fact, Fiction, and the Politics of Knowledge. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick, 205–222. New York, NY: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. Feminism, Ecological Thinking and the Legacy of Rachel Carson. In Reconsidering Knowledge: Feminism and the Academy, ed. Meg Luxton and Mary Jane Mossman. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Feminist Epistemology and the Politics of Knowledge: Questions of Marginality. In The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Mary Evans, Clare Hemmings, Marsha Henry, Hazel Johnstone, Sumi Madhok, Ania Plomien, and Sadie Wearing, 9–25. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Care, Concern, and Advocacy: Is There a Place for Epistemic Responsibility? Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 1 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. Introducing the New Materialisms. In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–43. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Craft, Aimée. 2013. Breathing Life into the Stone Fort Treaty: An Anishinabe Understanding of Treaty One. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Purich Publishing Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Curtis, Bruce. 2002. The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • de la Bellacasa, M.P. 2012. ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care. The Sociological Review 60: 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doucet, Andrea. in press, 2018. Do Men Mother? Fathering, Care, Parental Responsibilities (2nd Edition). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. American Journal of Sociology 103 (2): 281–317. https://doi.org/10.1086/231209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grasswick, Heidi E. 2011. Introduction: Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Twenty-First Century. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick. New York, NY: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical Ontology. Boston: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1991. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Donna Haraway, 183–201. London: Free Association Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1997. Modest−Witness@Second−Millennium.Femaleman−Meets−Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1987. Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialism, Feminisms and Epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Borderlands Epistemologies. In Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader, ed. Alison M. Jaggar, 331–341. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harding, Sandra, and Merril B. Hintikka, eds. 2003. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. 2nd ed. Dordrecht, Holland: Springer Netherlands.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartsock, Nancy C.M. 1983. The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and M.B. Hintikka, 283–310. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1998. The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2003. The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and B. Hintikka Meril, 2nd ed. Dordrecht, Holland: Springer Netherlands.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heideigger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hekman, Susan. 2010. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill Collins, Patricia. 1986. Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought. Social Problems 33: 14–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1997. Comment on Hekman’s ‘Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited’: Where’s the Power? Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22: 375–381.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London and New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. Toward an Ecology of Materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (1): 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Intemann, Kristen. 2010. Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now? Hypatia 25 (4): 778–796.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kovach, Margaret Elizabeth. 2010. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacey, Hugh. 2003. Seeds and their Sociocultural Nexus. In Science and Other Cultures, ed. Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding, 91–105. New York, NY: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lam, Carla. 2015. New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment: Feminist and Material Resolutions. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lear, Linda. 1977. Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1993. Subjects, Power and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lykke, Nina. 2010. The Timeliness of Post-Constructionism. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18 (2): 131–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038741003757760.

  • Mauthner, Natasha. 2015. ‘The Past Was Never Simply There to Begin with and the Future Is Not Simply What Will Unfold’: A Posthumanist Performative Approach to Qualitative Longitudinal Research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18 (3): 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2015.1022298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mauthner, Natasha S., and Andrea Doucet. 2003. Reflexive Accounts and Accounts of Reflexivity in Qualitative Data Analysis. Sociology 37 (3): 413–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385030373002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Knowledge Once Divided Can Be Hard to Put Together Again. Sociology 42 (5): 971–985. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038508094574.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McNay, Lois. 2003. Agency, Anticipation and Indeterminacy in Feminist Theory. Feminist Theory 4 (2): 139–148.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nelson, Lynn Hankinson. 1990. Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1993. Epistemological Communities. In Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, 121–159. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Powell, Christopher. 2013. Radical Relationalism: A Proposal. In Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, ed. Christopher Powell and François Dépelteau, 187–207. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rolin, Kristina. 2011. Contextualism in Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick, 25–44. New York, NY: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rooney, Phyllis. 2011. The Marginalization of Feminist Epistemology and What that Reveals about Epistemology ‘Proper’. In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, ed. Heidi E. Grasswick, 3–24. London and New York: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Hilary. 1983. Hand, Brain and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1: 73–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rosenau, Paulne. 2002. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rouse, Joseph. 2009. Standpoint Theories Reconsidered. Hypatia 24 (4): 200–209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sevenhuijsen, S. 1998. Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Simpson, Leanne B. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg, MB: Arbeiter Ring Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3 (3): 1–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1989. Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy. In Feminism and Sociological Theory, ed. R.A. Wallace, 34–64. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1999. Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Somers, Margaret R. 1994. The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach. Theory and Society 23 (5): 605–649.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, Kathleen. 2010. Afterword. Worlding Refrains. In The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 339–354. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strathern, Marilyn. 2005. Partial Connections. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taguchi, Hillevi Lenz. 2012. A Diffractive and Deleuzian Approach to Analysing Interview Data. Feminist Theory 13 (3): 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112456001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1995. Care as a Basis for Radical Political Judgements (Symposium on Care and Justice). Hypatia 10 (2): 141–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tuana, Nancy. 2001. Material Locations: An Interactionist Alternative to Realism/Social Constructivism. In Engendering Rationalities, ed. Nancy Tuana and Sandra Morgen. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2008. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 188–213. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. forthcoming. Being Affected by Climate Change: The Anthropocene and the Body of Ethics. In Ethics and the Anthropocene, ed. Kenneth Shockley and Andrew Light. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, ed. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2002. A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies: Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners. Social Studies of Science 32 (5/6): 729–762.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2013. Engagements between Disparate Knowledge Traditions: Toward Doing Difference Generatively and in Good Faith. In Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, ed. Lelsey Green. Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watts, Vanessa. 2013. Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (1): 20–34.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brock University, Catharines, ON, Canada

    Andrea Doucet

Authors
  1. Andrea Doucet
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

    François Dépelteau

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Doucet, A. (2018). Shorelines, Seashells, and Seeds: Feminist Epistemologies, Ecological Thinking, and Relational Ontologies. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_19

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66004-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66005-9

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation