Ariel Salleh is a feminist writer and activist whose transdisciplinary interests span critical social theory, political movement ideologies, environmental ethics, peoples science, and globalisation (google scholar).
Her most recent book - Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice - is a collection of essays written with a team of internationally distinguished women, addressing the deficit of sex/gender awareness as it affects the conceptualisation of political economy, ecological economics, and sustainability studies.
An earlier book - Ecofeminism as Politics - subtitled nature, Marx, and the postmodern outlines what she describes as an embodied materialism, applying this theoretical lens in an analysis of globalisation. The book builds on classic philosophical tensions between agency and structure; production and reproduction; and spells out the social effects of what she identifies as the originary contradiction. This accounts for the othering and economic resourcing of labour (women's bodies in the first instance) 'as nature' and the eurocentric ideology of humanity versus nature which is used to justify that systemic exploitation.
In contrast to idealist ecofeminisms emerging from philosophy and cultural studies, this materialist approach is close to that of Maria Mies in Germany and Mary Mellor in the UK - reproductive labour and use value being central themes. Salleh argues that an embodied materialist framework helps draw together the strategies of diverse alter-mondiale movements by means of the integrating concept of meta-industrial labour.
Salleh's political perspective grows out of a reading of critical sociology and experiences of care-giving, anti-nuclear struggle, water catchment politics, and biodiversity conservation. Her work exemplifies the marxist position that hands-on praxis is essential to ground social theory. Before taking up university teaching, she worked in Aboriginal communities. She co-convened the Movement Against Uranium Mining in Sydney, 1976, and helped found The Greens in 1985. She worked on the 1992 Earth Summit with Women's Environment & Development Organization in New York; and returned to local catchment campaigning in the mid 90s. From 2001-04 she acted as ecologist/critic on the Australian government's Gene Technology Ethics Committee.
Ariel Salleh serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, notably Organization & Environment and Ecopolitics. And as a co-editor of Capitalism Nature Socialism, she en/genders dialogue between advocates of ecofeminist and eco-socialist politics. This journal has now become an important source of new ecofeminist writing.
Salleh's analysis has benefited from many academic opportunities, including time spent as Visiting Scholar in Environmental Conservation Education at New York University; as Visiting Professor at the Institute for Women's Studies in Manila; and as Associate Professor in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney. She now writes full time and is an Honorary Associate with Political Economy in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney.
Besides books, Ariel Salleh's published work includes well over 100 book chapters, and articles in peer reviewed journals and popular magazines. She also lectures widely on the implications of an ecofeminist standpoint for academic theory and for political action.
Dr Ariel Salleh, Department of Political Economy, School of Social & Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia
Tel 61 2 9351 4999 Fax 61 2 9351 3624 www.arts.usyd.edu.au a.salleh@usyd.edu.au