FEELING ALTERNATIVE FUTURES: HOW WE CAN LIVE A SOCIALLY JUST AND SUSTAINABLE FUTURE NOW

Abstract

To confront the rapidly approaching ecological and human systems collapse, I have chosen to use a critical feminist, ecological, and social justice framework to examine the ways humans could avert this collapse and build new human societies after an extinction event. I explore the epistemologies of the patriarchal Euro-American canon of scholarship and literature as well as alternative thinking found in indigenous and feminist literature to break the stranglehold of neoliberal dystopian thinking and existential brinksmanship. Using narrative and utopian guided research and community interviews, I show how grassroots activism, often led by women, is critical to building imagined futures capable of creating socially just and resource sustainable communities. Communities that are creating and feeling alternative futures now are the best hope for human survival in the impending catastrophe. Human societies must face the essential flaw that has brought them to the brink of extinction, which I argue is the subjugation of women through patriarchy. The survival of the human species hinges on a paradigm shift to matriarchy, which is not the mirror image of patriarchy, but is instead an egalitarian, gender balanced governance with matrilineal resource sharing.