From Feminist Thinking to Ecological Thinking: Determining the Bounds of Community

That Lorraine Code's Ecological Thinking is a feminist book even though neither "feminism" nor "gender" appears in the title is not at all surprising in this day and age, when feminist projects have expanded beyond strict concerns of gender, recognizing that gender cannot be understood in isolation.¹ Recall, for example, Alcoff and Potter's 1993 introduction to their volume Feminist Epistemologies, where they described the breadth of concerns found in contemporary feminist epistemologies, claiming that "feminist epistemology should not be taken as involving a commitment to gender as the primary axis of oppression, in any sense of 'primary,' or positing that gender is a theoretical variable separable from other axes of oppression and susceptible to a unique analysis" (3–4). For their part, Alcoff and Potter were suggesting that we look to the historical trajectory of works in order to see how they fit into the body of literature of feminist epistemology. Similarly, it is helpful to consider Ecological Thinking in historical relation to Code's own large body of work in order to understand better how the idea of ecological thinking enriches her work and clarifies some of the challenges facing feminist epistemology.

Trajectory of Code's work

Tracing the genealogy of Code's work reveals a distinct direction toward an increasingly rich understanding of the systematic (in the sense of general patterns that emerge) yet open-ended nature of knowledge production as social inquiry. Though she now views her first book, Epistemic Responsibility, as relying on an "excessively benign conception of community" (Code 2006, v), it stood out in 1987 in its recognition of our dependence on the knowledge of others and in its claim that because of such dependence on each other, knowledge production needs to be examined in relation to our moral and political frameworks. By 1991, with What Can She Know? Code was explicitly and thoroughly attending to the gendered dimensions of both knowing practices and epistemologies, articulating the "effectiveness of established epistemologies in serving white, privileged, masculine interests," and developing the resources to think epistemologically about the intersubjectivity of knowers, both developmentally and constitutively (267).² In her 1995 Rhetorical Spaces, Code called for "an epistemology of everyday life" (xi) in contrast to the formalized and idealized epistemologies with which epistemologists and philosophers of science residing in North American philosophy departments are so familiar. Her series of essays in that collection illustrated such an epistemology of everyday lives, examining the particularities of those lives, all the while noticing and striving to take account of larger patterns of interaction and conceptual shaping that help construct our specific experiences of knowledge. Building on the gendered themes of What Can She Know? her analyses in Rhetorical Spaces were "generated out of structures and circumstances where women occupy positions of minimal epistemic authority and where questions of differential power and privilege figure centrally" (xiii).

In Ecological Thinking, Code continues to develop an epistemological approach that comes out of a focused attention to women's lives yet reaches far beyond a strictly gendered analysis. Code works the concept "ecological" to articulate the many aspects of the situatedness of knowing and our study of it, especially the need to understand specific knowledge practices in relation to our other social practices—epistemic, epistemological, and otherwise. Throughout the book, she examines various knowledge practices through a gender-sensitive lens, illustrating an ecological approach with many examples that engage gender without ever implying that gender stands in isolation from other axes of oppression and social stratification.

But seeing gender as intertwined with other axes of oppression and social stratification is only one aspect of the deeply relational nature of ecological thinking that Code recommends. Ecological thinking is a multidimensional concept. Code describes it as "a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice" (2006, 5). Ecological thinking isn't just about each of these things; it is centrally about the interconnections among them and how they mutually shape one another. In its focus on these interconnections, it serves as a tool...