About Wendy Harcourt
Wendy Harcourt is Associate Professor in Critical Development and Feminist Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. She joined ISS/EUR in 2011, after twenty years at the Society for International Development in Rome, as Editor of Development and Director of Programmes. Her most recent edited collections are Practicing Feminist Political Ecology: Beyond the Green Economy (2015) and OUP Handbook on Transnational Feminist Movements (2015). Her monograph Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development (2009) received the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.
Our understanding of the environment is first and foremost informed by our experience of place—the geographic location where we live, work, and interact with nature and people. Our identity, culture, history, and politics are bound up in a sense of place. Though intuitively place may seem inherently conservative, a reading of place as a site of progressive politics allows us to understand more concretely how environment is linked to culture through relations of power, agency, and responsibility to human and nonhuman environments (Harcourt and Escobar 2005).