Feminist Systems Thinking: The effectiveness of practicing the principles

Abstract

Bringing together both systems theory and ecofeminism has produced an original set of principles that contain implications for community development and social research.

The ‘systems’ theory contribution the principles enriches our repertoires of methods and tools with an emphasis on systems thinking, characterised by the use of boundary analysis, and ideally situated to enhance systemic intervention practice (an application of action research and participatory research practices). 

The ecofeminist contribution brings to the fore the importance of valuing and considering the voices of people at the margins of social research and community development projects and is an effort towards a new ontology and language of person and nature to adequately address environmental marginalization. 

This workshop will briefly describe the principles and their origin, but provide practitioners to use the principles in an evaluation exercise to assess the value of the principles to community development projects.  A case study will be presented to demonstrate recent findings, which will serve to scaffold practitioners own thinking as they explore the principles in the context of their own work.