Abstract
Introduction to the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies. This issue is a collective effort to think with and through the notion of 'feminist technoecologies'.
One of the shared starting points of the contributions is that the term is not simply the conjoining, but a simultaneous reworking, of 'technologies' and 'ecologies', from various feminist perspectives. The articles provide critical responses to the contemporary challenges of environmental degradation, refugee crises and digital technologisation by asking how the boundary is drawn between the technological and the ecological, and how these distinctions are informed by implicit and explicit investments in the exceptional status of the human condition.
They share the view that technology is not simply a neutral tool for management and advancement, any more than ecology is merely the environment, whose harmonious organisation becomes disturbed by human enterprises and technological interventions. As editors of this special issue, we are excited about the various ways in which the concept of 'feminist technoecologies' informs and is emergent in particular contexts of investigation.
And yet, such a multiplicity also requires clarification of how this term threads through this issue. This introduction starts by explicating key questions and concerns provoked by the use of this concept.
In so doing, wemake visible how this concept is mobilised by, and links, the different articles. We then go on to focus on two themes that are taken up within the special issue, namely ethicality and care, and affect and the senses.
Through these thematic foci, we offer a more detailed account of how the concept of 'feminist technoecologies' functions as a theoretical and methodological tool and how it relates to other natureculture approaches.