1. Gender and sustainability in ecological intentional communities
- Author
-
Bhatia, Monica Elaine
- Subjects
- Gender, Sustainability, Climate change, Intentional community, Communes, Navdanya, Vandana Shiva, Twin Oaks, Social movements, Feminism, Utopias
- Abstract
In 2018, the International Panel on Climate Change warned that hundreds of millions of people face immediate risk of drought, floods, and extreme heat due to global warming. In this thesis, I introduce ecological intentional communities, alternative societies where people live together based on explicit common values, including radical sustainability and participatory democracy. I discuss my interview and ethnographic research at two communities, Navdanya Bioconversation Farm and Twin Oaks Intentional Community, that are seeking anti-capitalist, feminist solutions to global climate change. I discuss how Navdanya mobilizes essentialist rhetoric about the role of third-world women in environmental stewardship in order to increase their economic power and legitimize their agricultural knowledge. My research on Twin Oaks provides new directions for gendered organization theory by illuminating the potential of restructuring work and familial arrangements in a manner that directly confronts the unpaid care work of women and the hierarchical division of labor. This thesis demonstrates how ecological intentional communities can serve as real utopian models for restructuring society beyond patriarchy, capitalism, and environmental degradation.
- Published
- 2020