Sarah Clark

Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.

Based on extensive fieldwork, this book demonstrates how gender is an organizing principle of entrepreneurial ecosystems and makes a difference in how ecosystem resources are assembled and how they can be accessed. By bringing visibility to how ecosystem actors are heterogeneous across identities, interactions and experiences, the book highlights the role and complexity of individual, organizational, and institutional factors working in concert to create and maintain gendered inequities. Entrepreneurial Ecosystems provides research-driven insights around effective organizational practices and policies aimed at remedying gendered and intersectional inequalities associated with entrepreneurship activities and economic growth. Proposing a typology of four ecosystem identities, it highlights how some might be more amenable and organized towards gender inclusion and change, while others may be much more difficult to change, reorganize and restructure. It offers scholars, students, practitioners and policymakers insights about gender in relation to analyzing entrepreneurial ecosystems and for fostering inclusive economic development policies.

_The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation_ argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest.