The sentence, drumroll, is:
Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.
(OK, it doesn’t talk about how to project addresses that, and what the aim and objectives are. So not really the project in a sentence. But it’s the crux of it.)
ethic of care, but with accountability
Where it came from: I realised there was a tension, I kept talking about red flags, e.g. in the Human Voice post, and the Turnhout lecture notes. But then I kept talking around it in the proposal. Finally, I managed to pin it down as the essence of the project. That’s my current thought, anyway. Written into sortof proposal speak:
Critique from environmental humanities scholars relating to the management of natural crises pointed towards approaching the polycrisis we face with a feminist ethic of care (Green, 2018, Turnhout 2024). This resonated with me because it was clear that the conventional ways of managing urban infrastructures and natural resources were not working, especially where these two interact.
An ethic of care prioritizes empathy, compassion, and interpersonal relationships, complementing an ethic of justice which focuses on fairness, rights, and moral rules. Care ethics tends to be more contextual and particularized, considering individual circumstances and narratives, whereas justice ethics strives for universality and impartiality. An ethic of care is particularly relevant in situations where any approach is likely to be fraught, or contested.
A feminist ethic of care considers a pluralist approach, in contrast to the patriarchal top-down “command and control”. Seen from some perspectives (REFS) this is a valid counter to the conventional means of governance, and may be linked to a large-scale transformation of expertise (Stampnitzky, 2023), which is necessary for the large-scale socio-ecological transformation required to sustain our desired way of life (Chan et al 2021).
However, this pursuit of a feminist ethic of care, and the transformation of expertise leads to a challenge of maintaining accountability, managing risk and the need to consider the longer-term consequences of actions (Collins, Evans and Reyes-Galindo, 2025) . Any approaches that embrace a feminist ethic of care need to balance that with scientific rigour and accountability.
In METAPLAY I consider both approaches, and synthesize a narrative strategy tool to facilitate thinking that reaches a transcendent middle (REF – Jungian), incorporating the feminist ethic of care, valuing other ways of knowing, or tacit knowledge, while maintaining the accountability that a functional science-based society requires.
Biosphere reserves
Ricardo suggested I consider biosphere reserves from the outset, and I agreed, but I thought they were just, places, and I would have to go in and sort it out from scratch, get to know the people, get people to talk to me etc. Ha, turns out they’re an actual thing, part of a UNESCO initiative called “Man and the Biosphere Programme” (clearly this acronym had no Americans involved. Americans understand how to do good acronyms.)
Realising this is a thing made my project focus easier. But, looking at the map of locations, their global presence, and their stated objective that “aims to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments” along with some challenges documented in the articles I found, I thought a collection of simulations that can extend their reach into the digital would be so cool. A biosphere metaverse, if you like. The articles: Biosphere reserves as landscape laboratories for sustainability transitions, one relating biosphere reserves to the COVID pandemic and the digital shift, and Unlocking the potential of biosphere reserves: a review of structural, institutional, and ideational challenges to transformational learning.
I bounced this off a collaborator in the AquaSavvy project, and he liked the idea:
The MAB is a really promising area that needs extensive research. This is an international initiative and it’s quite necessary to integrate global diversities of the reserves into a tool using metaverse technologies or similar. This could be a good extension of AquaSavvy.
A tutorial of ‘Swedish National Park and Nature Reserve” to a group of visitors led to discussions about Swedish governance models and economic aspect of the reserves. There is a lack of research in human-nature interactions and digitalized system (let alone AI). People have difficulties to search information, e.g., type, size, climate, accessibility, immersed environment, etc.
I’m keen to explore this next. Look at funding routes, unpack the components we would need, and start applying, first for smaller, more focused projects, and then larger ones maybe middle next year.
Glass cliffs
In the proposal there is a “Gender dimension and other diversity aspects” section where you have to put in some blah blah about how you are looking at gender and diversity without rocking the neo-capitalist shitshow that is the world too much. I was still feeling sensitive after my losing my voice sadness and thought, there’s two groups of people (behaviour?) I want to reach here. Those who have lost their voices and left, and those who have broken glass ceilings just in time to be faced with a glass cliff. And I cried again, this project is hitting me so deep. Turns out, there’s literature to legitimise both these things.
Women are good leaders. A 2025 article titled Female leadership: An integrative review and research framework, posits that women tend to be underrepresented in leadership positions but are often argued to be more effective leaders than men. Their article provides “a holistic and integrative perspective on factors that determine whether women become leaders in the first place and whether they become effective leaders.”
In the past decade or so I saw a lot of women step into leadership in really difficult circumstances, and then often, it all went to shit after that. Easy to say the women messed it up, but they were handed a poisoned chalice. They were appointed at the helm of a sinking ship while the people who causes the ruckus jumped ship. I wondered why we would take that on, do we have illusions of grandeur, or too much people pleasingness, or just care too much, that we jump in to save a dying beast? Why not just let it die? Is there ambition to shape things to our will, now that everyone else gave up and got out of the way, or have we reached a point of conquering ruins? For me, certainly, it’s attractive to lead something when no one cares anymore to get in my way, or come and mansplain or have power struggles. Yes, I have to do it all myself, carry it all, but at least I get to call the shots in peace. My passions on my terms. I still burn out, but the vibe is different. Heh. Pick your poison, I guess.
This article, titled The who, when, and why of the glass cliff phenomenon: A meta-analysis of appointments to precarious leadership positions explores this. “Women and members of other underrepresented groups who break through the glass ceiling often find themselves in precarious leadership positions, a phenomenon that has been termed the glass cliff.”
For me, at this point in my life, it feels like my choices are either facing a glass cliff, or give up altogether. When I left academia, everything, really, and limped to a piece of hot dust back in 2018, I didn’t know what’s next. To be honest I thought maybe that’s just where I’ll die. I chose to get horses because that was the last thing on my bucket list, a remnant of a childhood fantasy. I thought I would slowly slip away there, but instead, I healed. I fomented. I sat in my silence and I brewed up trouble. So what happened, in that silence, inside me? It led to clarity, but because nature abhors a vacuum it also pushed dormant conflicts to the surface, leading to resolutions that maybe should better have stayed hidden.
There’s plenty articles looking into silence, as per a google scholar search, and it seems that it is more complicated than simply losing one’s voice.
Choosing silence: Rethinking voice, agency and women’s empowerment, a chapter in a book called Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process. – “Feminist research is informed by a history of breaking silences, of demanding that women’s voices be heard, recorded and included in wider intellectual genealogies and histories. This has led to an emphasis on voice and speaking out in the research endeavour. Moments of secrecy and silence are less often addressed. This gives rise to a number of questions. What are the silences, secrets, omissions and and political consequences of such moments?”
It’s time, for me, to look into that.