Hypatia

To begin, I would like to thank the contributors to this symposium for the time and thought they have devoted to preparing their responses to Ecological Thinking. As in the best of such situations, it is especially gratifying to recognize how much I have learned about my own work from these readings; how much I can take away from them to pursue the lines of thought I develop in Ecological Thinking (2006), beyond the place where I thought I had tied them all together, at the end of the book. Each of the discussion pieces raises issues that had not occurred to me or that I had thought of rather differently in writing the book; each poses tough questions. It is sobering, but good, to know that the book's concluding claims are not the last words on the subject: to see it as a moment in an ongoing conversation.

What I hoped to do in Ecological Thinking, as Christine Koggel aptly notes, was to make good on the promissory note on which I conclude What Can She Know? (1991), where I outline my belief in the power of an ecological model, developed from a grounding in feminist epistemology but insisting that gender cannot be understood in isolation from other axes of oppression and social stratification, to transform the terms of the Anglo-American "epistemological project" (somewhat cursorily unified) by challenging its assumptions, methods, and structures. I had not read the challenge I develop as a "general dismissal of mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science" (162), as Richmond Campbell does in his contribution to this symposium, but rather as a critical-creative engagement from within: a form of immanent critique. So, clearly, I need to clarify my intentions. In thinking about how to "say it isn't so," I welcome Phyllis Rooney's subtle meditations on the "in-between," for I do indeed conceive of my philosophical project, both in this book and elsewhere, as occupying theoretical spaces "in-between," which allow movement back and forth, into and away from the best that mainstream theories of knowledge [End Page 187] have to offer, while simultaneously exposing and avoiding their more egregious limitations—or so I hope—and evading the risk of mere fence-sitting. Ever mindful, as Heidi Grasswick observes, of how knowledge is institutionalized in its multiple modalities, I am endeavoring to travel a path toward articulating a fuller picture of how knowing subjects and their engagements in informal and formal practices of knowing are mutually constitutive.

In working toward making good on that long-ago promise, I have been both inspired and troubled by my entry into the language of ecology. On an everyday level, there is something not very exciting—perhaps even disturbing—about producing what might at first glance appear to be "just another book about ecology"; and something still more disturbing when the book with ecology in its title is not really about ecology in the way prospective readers might expect it to be. Yet the language of ecology offers such richness in its literal usages and in the metaphorical resources it makes available, that the decision to opt for it despite my ongoing hesitations continues to be the right one.

Ecology talk brings with it the advantage of being already in circulation as part of diverse ongoing public conversations, political discourses, power structures, and the myriad ways in which people and epistemic practices situate themselves and the issues they care about, in and in relation to one another and to the events, circumstances, contingencies, and reasonably fixed aspects of the world. I elaborate it to invite a conceptual shift from taken-for-granted to innovative ways of thinking about ecology itself, and toward opening an interpretive range that is as productive, and as prescriptive, as it is descriptive. It does not float so freely that it can be all things to all people: even if its scope and limits cannot precisely be delineated, there are epistemic practices, theories, and ways of being and...