Melanie Levick-Parkin and Francesca Casnati
The discipline of Contemporary design theory increasingly presents relationality, situatedness, care, interdependence and more-than-human entanglement as significant developments associated with recent ontological and epistemological turns, including posthumanism, new materialism, decolonial thought, pluriversal design and the care turn (Braidotti, 2013; Bennett, 2010; Escobar, 2018; Willis, 2019). Yet many of the epistemological and political commitments underpinning these developments were articulated decades earlier through ecofeminist thought. Ecofeminist thinkers challenged the dualisms through which human/nature, culture/nature and reason/emotion are constructed as oppositional and hierarchical (Warren, 1990; Plumwood, 1993); questioned universal and disembodied claims to knowledge through situated and partial perspectives (Haraway, 1988); connected ecological relations to gendered labour, dependency and extraction (Mies & Shiva, 1993; Mellor, 1997); and challenged anthropocentric accounts of human–nonhuman relations (Plumwood, 1993; Gaard, 2011).
The paper asks what happens to these commitments as they migrate into contemporary design theory: what is retained, what is transformed, and what becomes obscured.
The contribution argues that ecofeminism constitutes an important yet under-recognised genealogy within contemporary relational and ontological design discourse. This is not a claim that posthuman, decolonial, pluriversal or care-based design derives from ecofeminism alone, nor that ecofeminism represents a singular origin for these diverse traditions. Rather, significant conceptual continuities can be traced between ecofeminist epistemologies and propositions now central to contemporary design theory. The outcome is not the disappearance of ecofeminist thought, but its quiet assimilation and systematic under-attribution: ecofeminist commitments remain present within contemporary vocabularies while the feminist, situated and explicitly political genealogies through which they were developed become less visible. This matters because it can separate relational concepts from the critiques of domination, patriarchy, colonialism, labour and extraction that gave them political force.
Through a genealogical and conceptual mapping approach, the paper traces four areas of continuity: anti-dualism and relationality (Warren, 1990; Plumwood, 1993); situated knowledge and challenges to universalising epistemologies (Haraway, 1988); care, dependency and maintenance (Mies & Shiva, 1993; Mellor, 1997); and more-than-human relationality (Plumwood, 1993; Gaard, 2011). The analysis does not treat these continuities as evidence of simple intellectual inheritance. Instead, it examines how ecofeminist propositions are translated, renamed and reformulated within contemporary design discourse, and what political and epistemological dimensions may be displaced through that process.
Two practice-based cases demonstrate how this analytical framework can be applied across contemporary design’s wider “turns”. Joanna Zylinska’s Feminist with a Drone (2022) illustrates an implicit and translated genealogy, in which concerns resonant with feminist critiques of authoritative and anthropocentric visuality are articulated through posthuman and technological vocabularies. In contrast, Ecofeminism in Practice: Provo-typing in Gothenburg demonstrates an explicit genealogy in which ecofeminism remains named and methodologically active. Read together, the cases demonstrate that genealogy is not simply a matter of attribution: it changes what a concept is able to ask. When relationality is detached from its ecofeminist genealogy, it can become an apparently neutral description of interconnectedness; when that genealogy remains visible, relational ontology can retain its capacity to question domination, dependency, gendered labour, extraction and ecological injustice.
The paper concludes that recovering these lineages has implications for systemic design pluralism. Pluralism cannot simply mean admitting more perspectives into design; it must also examine which epistemologies are recognised, whose histories are remembered, and which ideas have already been absorbed into apparently newer frameworks. Recognising these genealogies therefore not only restores intellectual acknowledgement to feminist ecological thinkers, but reasserts the political and ethical dimensions of relational ontology within contemporary design discourse. To pluralise design epistemologies requires not only admitting more perspectives, but examining the genealogies through which some have already been absorbed, renamed and legitimised.
.
Keywords: ecofeminism, systemic design, design ontology, epistemic justice, pluralism, more-than-human design.