Steps Toward a Decolonial Feminist Ecology

Abstract

This chapter explores how embodied ecological practices might stretch the space/time of teaching and learning in Higher Education, (re-)orienting students and teachers toward justice and solidarity. Inspired by Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and recent initiatives by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ organisers to increase access to the land, we draw on experiences of facilitating encounters with the natural world in a Higher Education institution based in Devon, southwest England. While our journey begins with a walk designed to provide a break from the weight of study, unexpected ruptures open us to new modes of teaching and learning, connecting to each other and the land, and working toward material and epistemic decolonisation. Step by step, our story reveals how emergent educational futures might nourish political organising and extend the horizon/s of our work. By moving together through local woods, lanes and fields, we connect settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with the (present-day) coloniality of Britain—in ways that insist on our accountability and action. Moving, breathing and sensing invite new forms of encounter and collectivity, which ground us in a broader ethic of care and sense of shared struggle. These ties, we suggest, are the roots of a decolonial feminist ecology.