Intersectionality and Environmental Movements : British Activism in Global Context

In view of recent criticisms of the environmentalist movement for centring middle-class whiteness, this book examines the discourses, strategies, and theories of environmentalism in modern Britain through the Black feminist lens of intersectionality.

In view of recent criticisms of the environmentalist movement for centring middle-class whiteness, this book examines the discourses, strategies, and theories of environmentalism in modern Britain through the Black feminist lens of intersectionality. The author proposes a framework of ‘intersectional absences and presences’ to argue that how environmentalists understand—or ignore—intersectionality shapes their social movements in important ways. It affects how they build and communicate their political demands as environmentalists, as well as the literal spaces in which they organise. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, and archival research, it demonstrates the usefulness of intersectionality for analysing the structural relationships between discrete structures of oppression such as racism, sexism, and classism, and how political demands are built and communicated. This book will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students, and researchers of gender studies, social movements, political sociology, environmental sociology, and race and ethnicity.