Crossing Boundaries: Points of Encounter with People and Worlds ‘Otherwise’

Abstract

In response to the combined comments of Padini Nirmal, Ingrid L. Nelson and Lyla Mehta, and their own considerable contributions to feminist research on political ecology, I have found myself thinking of several paradoxes and con-tradictions that we all face in doing FPE. I do not have time to go into all the issues that their responses suggest but I would like to take this space to explore some of them. In our work we all have to cross the language and conceptual cultures of multiple academic audiences with distinct networks, paradigms and literatures (feminist, environmentalist, ecological, cultural studies and social science). All of us in FPE are combining elements of different schools of thought that nor-mally do not mix (critical and applied; political economic and cultural; policy and resistance). We also negotiate the even trickier border crossing between academic and activist audiences when seeking to narrate and visualize com-plex, non-linear realities within the pages of journals and books that rely on, or even require, linear narratives and two-dimensional graphic conventions. Each of us has engaged in extended field studies and immersion with people in social movements and/or organized farmers and forest-dwellers with whom we have shared many insights and observations, in both directions. Much of that exchange is in verbal form. Yet we have the unique privilege, professional mandate and perhaps moral hazard of writing about them and their worlds for various readers near and far. Sometimes it is all about them, and sometimes it is about theory or about an environmental context in which they are embedded. I have long been plagued by doubts about the validity of the entire enter-prise, which it is in part, after all. Meanwhile, I have worked hard to learn about and deal with differences, convergences, shared aspirations and multi-ple worlds at points of encounter (in space and time) with people and 'worlds otherwise'. This has involved stumbling into minefields of power, and step-ping back and acknowledging complex relations of privilege and subjugation across multiple dimensions of intersectional identity and affinity. This has also 276 W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development © The Editor(s) 2016 Dianne Rocheleau 277 meant 'muddling through' the morass of paradoxes and contradictions within and between various academic worlds, as well as between all of them and the communities and social movements making theory, policy and practice on the ground. This becomes particularly acute as I go back and forth between writing for, about, and with rural organizations and social movements. The piece included here was written about the federation in Zambrana to advance academic understanding of rooted networks as ecologies and communities oth-erwise, through a combination of feminist, ecological and rhizomatic thinking by academic and social movement actors. In contrast, I have taken rooted net-works further in a recent article on Chiapas where I illustrate and analyse the enmeshed networks of both land-grabbers and those resisting land grabs, to invite and inform academic and social movement discussion, yet with very lit-tle discussion of gender (Rocheleau 2015a). In another case I have presented rooted networks, with references to gender and other elements of complex identities, in four vignette cases tracking the development of the idea through encounters in multiple times and places (Rocheleau 2015b). Nirmal and I have co-written three forthcoming essays on gender and environment that address the issues of intersectionality, complex identities and decolonial approaches to gender. In my own work, and perhaps this is true for all three commenta-tors, there is the difficulty of walking across the lines between women-focused, gendered-focused and feminist-informed research and writing. Nelson's very explicit claim to feminist political ecology, in her recent dissertation, which is not 'about gender', motivated me to more explicitly reclaim as FPE my work that is not focused on gender but is feminist-informed political ecology. I see myself as a feminist working in political ecology and environmental justice at the intersection of science, justice, ecologies and cultures. I have a femi-nist curiosity about networked power, identity, affinity and difference between humans and other beings within and across territories. This curiosity leads me to study landscapes, ecologies and assemblies of people in relation, always marked by intersectional identities of humans and other beings, their technolo-gies, artefacts and the patterned processes of the living worlds in which they all exist. While I dream of working to maintain and grow the ecological basis for worlds where many worlds, and their peoples, can thrive, based on diverse examples of non-capitalist, feminist, indigenous and postcolonial approaches, I have been drawn into observing and describing complex networked powers in territories. Inspired by the imperfect but hopeful and imaginative social inno-vations of various social movements and indigenous people being, differently, I seek to understand the relational basis for those networks of humans and others beings connected to each other, in living worlds, in place and across places. There are elements of the geometries and geographies of power that I need to explore with readers in order to be able to think differently and to