Women Philosophers on Economics, Technology, Environment and Gender History. Shaping the Future – Rethinking the Past.

In times of current crisis, the voices of women are needed more than ever. The accumulation of war and environmental catastrophes teaches us that exploitation of people and nature through violent appropriation and enrichment for the sake of short-term self-interest exacts its price.

This book presents contributions on the most relevant and currently most urgent issues: The reshaping of the economy, environmental problems, technology. In addition, history from the non-Western and Western tradition is re-read. With an outlook into the problems of class, race and gender in its intersectional framing, the collection offers a unique overview of current research in these fields and contributes to the renewal and contemporary presentation of feminist thought from concrete perspectives and with regard to factual issues.

Though many things have changed for women in the last 40 – 50 years and mile steps have been taken to understand that women’s concern is one of human concern, that impacts everyone. The United Nation supported the advancement of gender equality through landmark agreements such as the Beijing Declaration, the Platform for Action and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). However, although themselves half of humanity and with the offspring under their responsibility, women make up more than 75 % of the world’s population, still they have little say in shaping the future and even less when we look into the past. Neither are women equally represented nor is it clear how the future should look like to enhance the change. Shaping the Future, Rethinking the Past is intended to fill this gap. In this volume world renowned philosophers as well as up-and-coming philosophers from all over the world sketch out in a constructive and in a critical take what must be changed, and how a world that takes into account women’s concern will look like. Together we shape the future and we re-interpret the past.

The book starts by recalling the founding of the Assoziation von Philosophinnen in Deutschland in the year 1974. The paper written by Herta Nagl-Docecal addresses the difficulties the Association encountered in its first decade, while it is now one of the most influential organizations of women philosophers.

The second part of the volume is dedicated to the most pressing topics of the present, economics, environment and technology. While women have yet to play a significant role in any of these fields and it is not clear how they will change the landmarks, this collection presents key texts on these topics to showcase the visions of established and new voices from women researchers. Fifteen papers are dedicated to the topics economics, environment, technology.

Economic Theory and Moral Imagination contributed by Julie A. Nelson, Boston University, US argues that economists have, for more than a century, portrayed economics as a physics-like discipline concerned with explaining the underlying mechanics of an amoral market system, presumed to be driven by self-interest and competition. Drawing on feminist work in economics, she examines the binary, hierarchical gender metaphors underlying these claims. Nelson explores the damage these biased beliefs have done to the creation of knowledge and to our ability to deal with issues such as climate change, and suggests alternatives. Federica Giardini is deeply rooted into the Italian feminist tradition. In Ecology and Economy. Feminist Perspectives she takes a perspective that refers economies with the other disciplines questioning the forms of knowledge that aggravate the hierarchy of economics to the point of autonomy: to proceed to formalization and to explain reality by datafication. She criticizes that economic science thus no longer consists in representing, and not even in producing, reality, but rather in a formalization – a sort of updated version of the 17th-century “Calculemus!”, that returns loaded with ideology. Giardini asks how an alternative perception of the feminine body will change the framework of economics and the links between economics and ecology. In doing so, she starts to reconstruct a feminist and genealogical perspective with the reconceptualization of the term “ value”. Value is in fact a hybrid term that connects morality and economics, and thus allows us to identify the interactions between ideology and mathematical calculation, in short, it allows us to trace the interaction between domination and exploitation. Andrea Günter, Freiburg University, Germany presents in her paper Towards a Feminist Theory of Money a critique of patriarchal economic structures, going back to the Aristotelian concept of justice and the intermediacy of money. Her demand to develop a feminist critique of money economics relates to a statement that denies the neutrality of money, much more she claims that its appearance within the different realms of social life, in its material and legal substance, and its social structure framed by reciprocity and justice, should be investigated for reconstructing its implicit patriarchal traditions. Kateryna Karpenko from National Medical University Kharkiv, Ukraine connects questions of Gender Justice and Ecological Issues. Karpenko argues that the environmental and economic problems are strongly connected to the distribution of roles in society between men and women. Now, as we are all facing the issue of survival this topic is receiving new interest. However, she adds a further argument, which is the neglect of a philosophical perspective. The philosophical discourse suffers from all sides as it neglects philosophical tasks, such as to come up to universalist stances. The mechanism of formation of research approaches has become pluralistic and highly dynamic, but the reference to universal principles should not be ignored. In Sultana’s Dream: Eco‍[U]‌topian and Feminist Intersections, Shalini Attri and Priyanka Singh, from BPS Women’s University, India present a broad scope tackling with Earth’s geology, anthropogenic climate change, the notion of capitalism, and the destruction of ecological resources. All these subjects are compelling for scholars to deal with the question of sustainability in the 21st century. A possible access to handle and to analyze this question is found in Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, a narrative of ecotopia that dissolves the logocentric and essentialist notions centered on women and men offering a revolutionary combination to handle the ecological crisis successfully by investigating the harmful environmental impacts. Contributor Anne Sauka, from the University of Latvia, presents with Ontogenealogies of Body-Environments an onto-genealogical approach to the analysis of the lived, experienced materiality of the body- environment assemblage. In particular, she explores the tie between the bio‍(il)‌logical and biopolitical, characterizing this tie as a twofold onto-genealogical linkage that both a) reflects the genealogical character of life itself, as well as b) invites a critical analysis of the prevailing ontologies as co-constructive of lived materialities. It highlights the potential of considering local onto-genealogies that reflect alternative ontologies and run parallel to the dominant paradigm of the Global North. Corinna Casi, from Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science HELSUS, Finland discusses Different Perspectives on Indigenous Women’s Position in her Women, Nature and Neocolonial Struggles and situates the gender inequality debate within the relation between nature and women, conceptualized academically in 1970s in the philosophical field of ecofeminism. The paper also discusses the limitation of the women- nature link and then moves to the field of Indigenous feminism keeping the focus of the relation between nature and women and observing how this has influenced the condition of women within Indigenous communities such as the Igbo people in Nigeria, the Kahnawa:kev people in Canada and the Sami people living in Sapmi.

The following six articles deal with...