Russell, Constance, Gough, Annette, and Whitehouse, Hilary (2018) Gender and environmental education in the time of #MeToo. Journal of Environmental Education, 49 (4). pp. 273-275.

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Abstract

[Extract] The second special issue of The Journal of Environmental Education devoted to gender and environmental education comes at an interesting moment in popular culture. The #MeToo movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to support girls and women of color who had experienced sexual violence, became a global phenomenon in 2017 when celebrities popularized the phrase as a hashtag when discussing sexual violence and harassment in the entertainment industry. The hashtag took off, with 12 million tweets in the first 24 hours (Mendes, Ringrose, & Keller, 2018), from 85 different countries that had at least 1,000 tweets each (Park, 2017, para. 1). While the movement has been galvanizing for many (Mendes et al., 2018), feminist scholars nonetheless have concerns about its unfolding, including the erasure of Black activist women in many accounts (Emejulu,2018) and lack of awareness of how race, class, and celebrity status are factors that influence why certain testimonies are more likely to be heard and believed (Zarkov & Davis, 2018). Zarkov and Davis (2018) also worry that too much focus on individuals may downplay that sexual violence is a collective problem that requires "grass-roots activism as well as transforming institutions" (p. 5). At this point, as Mendes et al. (2018) observe, "we still know very little about what hashtags like #MeToo actually do; or whether and how they can produce social change" (p. 3).

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