Papers by Valerie Padilla Carroll
Environment and History, 2021
Ralph and Myrtle Mae Borsodi, two early twentieth century back-to-the-land writers based in rural... more Ralph and Myrtle Mae Borsodi, two early twentieth century back-to-the-land writers based in rural New York state, wrote the rural agrarian smallholding as a kind of refugium, a philosophical and physical site for those self-sufficient smallholders to survive, even thrive, through an expected US cultural extinction. The centre of their back-to-the-land agrarian refugium is the heterocouple complete with attached gendered roles and expectations. For this self-sufficiency promoting couple, the rural back-to-the-land homestead was the future of a new and better America made up of decentralised, self-sufficient farms and workshops run by those Ralph termed 'quality-minded men'. Indeed, both in their writings and in real life, their self-sufficiency rested on the backs of urban factory workers, the poor and, most likely, people of colour - domestic labourers. Such exploitation was not incidental, but a key component of the ideal world imagined by this couple.
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2016
In this article, I explore “new domesticity” and its radical potential for gender and eco justice... more In this article, I explore “new domesticity” and its radical potential for gender and eco justice. While I borrow Matchar’s term to identify this social phenomenon, I expand her definition to investigate this burgeoning movement. Matchar’s new domesticity focuses primarily on Gen Y/youth personal growth and individual self-discovery, which may or may not have environmental concerns. The new domesticity I explore here moves beyond the self to the political, emerging as a radical, eco, and feminist housewifery that grew out of and in response to the US Women’s Liberation Movement. It proffers a mode of simple living as a solution to environmental and social injustice. From this feminist and environmentalist base, new domesticity promotes its altermodernity project: an anticapitalist environmental activism that embraces a global vision of sustainability based on reciprocity and care.
Introduction.- Part I: Agriculture, Food and Forestry.- Where Environmental Policy is Social Poli... more Introduction.- Part I: Agriculture, Food and Forestry.- Where Environmental Policy is Social Policy: Nature, Food, Society and Metabolic Processes.- Protecting Food Security, the Rural Poor and the Environment: The Case of Climate Change Mitigation in Animal Agriculture.- Living off the Fat of Another Land: Trans Fat Social Policy and Environmental Externalities.- Forest Sustainability and the Social Context: Applying the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators.- Forest Sustainability and Social Policy: The Role of Ecosystem Services.- Part II: Developing New Urban Spaces.- Sustainable Urbanism: Creating Resilient Communities in the Age of Peak Oil and Climate Destabilization.- Planning Sustainable Cities: Why Environmental Policy needs Social Policy.- Chinese Model Cities and Cancer Villages: Environmental Policy is Social Policy.- A Peek Over the Fence: Urban Agriculture as an Instrument of Social and Environmental Policy.- When Environmental and Social Policy Converge: The Case of Boston's Fairmount Line.- Part III: Work and Ecology, Tourism, University Management.- Social Policy is Environmental Policy: Paid Work, Unpaid Care Work, Gender, and Ecology.- Envisioning Environmental Policy as Social Policy: The Case of the International Cruise Line Industry.- Sustainable Universities: Rhetoric versus Facts.- Index.
The Journal of American Culture, 2017
where she teaches classes that explore the intersections of gender, race, class, and nature in po... more where she teaches classes that explore the intersections of gender, race, class, and nature in popular culture. Her current research centers on histories of feminist and other radical back-to-the-land movements.
Environmental Policy is Social Policy – Social Policy is Environmental Policy, 2013
In this article, I explore “new domesticity” and its radical potential for gender and eco justice... more In this article, I explore “new domesticity” and its radical potential for gender and eco justice. While I borrow Matchar’s term to identify this social phenomenon, I expand her definition to investigate this burgeoning movement. Matchar’s new domesticity focuses primarily on Gen Y/youth personal growth and individual self-discovery, which may or may not have environmental concerns. The new domesticity I explore here moves beyond the self to the political, emerging as a radical, eco, and feminist housewifery that grew out of and in response to the US Women’s Liberation Movement. It proffers a mode of simple living as a solution to environmental and social injustice. From this feminist and environmentalist base, new domesticity promotes its altermodernity project: an anticapitalist environmental activism that embraces a global vision of sustainability based on reciprocity and care.
Book: Who Gets to Go Back to the Land? by Valerie Padilla Carroll
Presented as non-fiction, back-to-the-land popular culture narrates a fantastic imagined world of... more Presented as non-fiction, back-to-the-land popular culture narrates a fantastic imagined world of amazing abundance and complete self-determination. In 20th and 21st centuries, the self-sufficiency popular culture in books, magazines, newsletters, websites, and YouTube channels, offers a promise of autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency on the land. Yet in the United States, this promise has always been offered to some and not others. Who Gets to go Back-to-the-land? analyses work by and about those on existing at the margins and the resistant narratives they construct. How do people treated as outsiders from mainstream society relate to and imagine going back-to-the-land? For those excluded, what is the promise of going back-to-the- land and how do they rewrite that back-to-the-land promise? Here, concepts that are associated with going back-to-the-land such as “freedom,” “autonomy,” “self-sufficiency,” and “self-reliance,” take on different meanings from different and intersecting social identities for people who identity as BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ+ folks. By using an intersectional feminist lens, Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-land? both illuminates the embedded race, gender, and heteronormative ideologies that reinforce dominant power in self-sufficiency popular culture and highlights the alternative stories of excluded peoples as they rewrite and reimagine a more inclusive promise of self-sufficiency.
Uploads
Papers by Valerie Padilla Carroll
Book: Who Gets to Go Back to the Land? by Valerie Padilla Carroll