Herbaria 3.0, including our motivations, process, and theoretical underpinnings. This project draws upon the critical understanding within environmental studies of the importance of narrative and storytelling for fostering a connection and commitment to environments and nonhuman beings. Situated within the field of environmental humanities, our website solicits, collects, and archives stories about the manifold relationships between plants and people, inviting visitors to read, share, or write their own story for digital publication. The kind of environmental storytelling that results, we argue, can (1) enrich our conceptualization of attachment to places, (2) expand our notion of what “counts” as an encounter with nature, and (3) help us recognize the agency of individual plants. We conclude that similar citizen humanities projects are crucial to the ongoing work of environmental humanities and environmental studies at large, for it is through such public engagement that we can meet the cultural challenges that seeded, and the societal problems occasioned by, ongoing climate change.Public engagement in crowd-sourced science projects such as iNaturalist or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a long-established practice within environmental studies and sciences. As a corollary to these “citizen science” efforts, “citizen humanities” engages public participation in humanities research and/or with humanities tools such as creative writing, photography, art-making, or conducting and recording interviews. In this essay, we outline our work creating a citizen environmental humanities website,  Herbaria 3.0 (www.herbaria3.org) is a citizen environmental humanities website designed to encourage the sharing of plant stories from people around the globe. Situated within the growing field of environmental humanities, our website solicits, collects, and archives stories about the manifold relationships between plants and people, inviting visitors to read, share, or write their own story for digital publication. The project brings together emergent scholarly perspectives  and established approaches  of relevance to environmental studies. Public engagement in crowd-sourced science projects such as iNaturalist or the Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a long-established practice within environmental studies and sciences  enrich our conceptualization of attachment to places, (2) expand our notion of what “counts” as an encounter with nature, and (3) help us recognize the agency of plant nature. We conclude that similar citizen humanities projects are crucial to the ongoing work of environmental humanities and environmental studies at large, for it is through such public engagement that we can meet the cultural challenges that seeded, and the societal crises that are occasioned by, ongoing climate change.Herbaria 3.0 project began in 2016 as a group of colleagues from a range of disciplines, including literature, history of science, experiential learning pedagogy, geography, plant biology, and horticulture, converged to contemplate the role and meaning of plants in era of rapid climate change and species displacement. The initial international project team consisted of five members: Tina Gianquitto (USA), Lauren LaFauci (Sweden/USA), Dawn Sanders (Sweden/UK), Maura Flannery (USA), and Terry Hodge (USA).The Herbaria 3.0 team designed, constructed, and launched a digital platform for the collection and dissemination of plant stories, www.herbaria3.org. Initial funding for the project  was supplied in 2017 by the Seed Box: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory centered at Linköping University, Sweden. Launched in 2018, the site draws upon a broad conception of “narrative” to encourage the sharing of all kinds of plant stories, including written stories, poems, photographs, and interviews and oral narratives; a linked Instagram account (@herbaria3.0) posts original images emphasizing human-plant interactions and invites other users to tag similar photos under the hashtag #alliseeisplants. As stories are submitted to the website, we curate them for the purpose of weaving each into a longer history of plant-human interactions by adding visuals, , historical/scientific correspondence, maps, and hyperlinks to other resources (such as open access databases and plant identification applications). Adding these layers to the website encourages visitors and participants to explore the history and science of plants and sparks recognition of human-plant relations over time.With these concerns in mind, and drawing upon the theoretical underpinnings supplied by the growing field of environmental humanities, the Herbaria 3.0, emerged out of our shared interest in herbaria as historical records of human-plant interactions and out of our desire to echo the participatory, citizen-science activity of making herbaria themselves. Herbaria are collections of dried, pressed plant specimens, collected first by professionals and then by laypeople alike, for hundreds of years. As Barbara Thiers , an online platform for educating visitors about the ways that plants shape and have shaped our culture over time, reflecting on economics, politics, law, and medicine, focusing on Black, Brown, and Indigenous voices (2021). These kinds of projects help highlight the erasures that happen in the colonization of plants and plant knowledge, specifically the erasures of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and of the histories of enslaved, indigenous, and colonized peoples, and of women, to name a few.Such stories can only be partially told through these specimen sheets, of course, which narrate or reveal a plant’s circulation in scientific knowledge cultures but which often isolate that plant from its historical and biocultural networks. Increasingly, researchers and others are reconnecting herbaria to their physical and historical contexts by, for instance, linking specimens to in situ plant and biocultural heritage inflection points , creates a database for the documentation and sharing of these environmental narratives, and reframes plant archives as living, evolving, and creative cultural productions.Just as one might consider an individual herbarium sheet as one layer in the historical record of human-plant encounters, and just as the large-scale digitization practices of these makes such records read-able new layers tracking such encounters over time, we imagined the stories of our site as adding a third layer to our natural-culturalThe site has been promoted widely to academic networks in arts, humanities, and sciences, on social media, and to public networks such as community gardens and gardeners, city and state botanic gardens, and conservation organizations. To aid those visitors to our site wishing to contribute but needing guidance to formulate a story “from scratch,” we created a “Resources” section where we share creative writing prompts and tips to help contributors craft their own stories. Finally, we also enabled the uploading of audio files to encourage interviewing of elders or anyone hesitant about writing a polished narrative for publication on the Internet. Like the “StoryCorps” project of NPR, we saw the audio option as a way to document experiences that might otherwise be lost to the ravages of time. For stories submitted as text, we established a practice of minimally editing authorial voices, allowing the original nuances of the storytellers to emerge without our interference.We acknowledge that a digital resource for documenting and sharing plant stories could be seen as antithetical to larger goals within environmental studies to engage people with material, physical environments, especially considering the increasing prevalence of digital media over the last two decades—and exponentially so during the first 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some might argue further that collecting stories about real-world nature in the virtual space risks creating a barrier between actual experience of the natural world and the virtual expression of it. Digital, mediated experiences of nature are perhaps seen as less “real” and thus less valuable for the goals of creating awareness, knowledge, and empathy toward nonhuman nature. We acknowledge that such mediated interactions with nature might in fact reduce that experience of nature to a prescriptive, normalized one Altrudi . And of Nevertheless, digital media promise many benefits to environmental studies and sciences, including broader access to and easier dissemination of information, wider community reach, and public participation in research. These digital resources—including social media such as Instagram and TikTok, podcasts such as Ologies, and apps such as iNaturalist—are increasingly recognized as powerful tools in environmental work, particularly in increasing interest in the natural world and generating positive affective responses to it ; several graduate programs and international centers; and countless books, edited volumes, articles, conferences, and networks. This explosion of production has paradoxically made the field both more immediately understandable and more difficult to succinctly define. And this inability to map the field may itself be descriptive: there are many possible entrypoints to the environmental humanities—disciplinarily, of course, but also from within and beyond academia—and a tentacular abundance of approaches creating and developing it.Despite its relative youth as a field, environmental humanities research has erupted in the last decade, yielding at least two field-specific journals  that deal with addressing environmental concepts, problems, or implications in qualitative ways .As academic disciplines, the environmental studies and sciences have long held promise for empowering individuals in this way and for joining the realm of research with policy and/or activism. It is understandable that humanities scholars in environmental subjects would also seek to make impacts here, for ethical reasons (the increasingly present and pervasive climate crises), professional ones (collaboration and trans-disciplinary work), and even for instrumental ones (such as funding opportunities). Since at least the 1960s, such public intellectual work bridging sciences and humanities has focused on bringing attention to environmental problems and policies. To take just one prominent example, Rachel Carson—trained as a scientist but writing for the general public with the skill of a poet and essayist—exposed connections between DDT and other chemicals with illness, arguably making irrevocable impact both on public awareness and on governmental policies. But despite the decades-long history of such public engagement in environmental problems, the particular promise of environmental humanities’ impact on environmental activism and policy has not been fully realized. Indeed, as Bergthaller et al.  argue, “Herbaria 3.0 website to combine the “slow scholarship” that we had undertaken prior to this project  with the faster, more responsive possibilities offered by digital humanities and environmental activism . This latter point, that the public must be involved not just in the consumption but also in the production of environmental knowledge, reveals the clear parallel between this newer realm and the more established one of “citizen science.” In both sets of projects, the public is deputized to participate directly in specialized research, albeit to varying degrees. In citizen environmental humanities, projects invite public production of humanities materials, such as environmental writing, photography or other art, sound recordings or interviews, and more.These intersections come together in the movement for “citizen environmental humanities.”Herbaria 3.0 website, we sought to highlight precisely these specific methods, practices, and tools of the humanities, providing a space to explore their contributions to environmental meaning-making, particularly around plant-human relations. While the public is often invited to participate in citizen environmental science projects—as in, for example, the Audubon Society’s international Christmas Bird Count, or in localized efforts like keeping watch over threatened nesting habitats of sea turtles—we realized that there were fewer opportunities to participate in environmental humanities research. Outside of museums, libraries, nature centers, or other public sites oriented around a particular  environmental issue, there were few opportunities for members of the public to contribute to environmental humanities research and knowledge-making broadly. Our website thus aimed to be one node in such networks, one way for individuals to contribute, from the comfort of their own homes, to a shared archive of environmental stories, on the one hand, and to potential future academic environmental humanities research, on the other. By writing their own stories, or by documenting their connection to a plant photographically, contributors to our site  would thus write their own plant story, see it published, and contribute to an environmental storytelling archive.In imagining our Herbaria 3.0 website, we began from a premise that environmental storytelling can foster knowledge- and meaning-making about plant-human interconnectedness in place and through time. Indeed, the original tagline of the site—“Where can a plant take you?”—invited such broad meditations on this interconnectedness, encouraging writers to journey through place, community, time, memory, and affect in their stories. At the same time, the phrase “a plant” was intentional: We hoped that by narrowing attention to an individual plant, as with an herbarium specimen page, specific dimensions of human and nonhuman relations would come into relief.“Place” in environmental storytelling has a particular richness, not limited to geographic location, that brings into focus the complex interrelations between and among human and nonhuman, rootedness and mobility, and memory, time, and affect.The diverse and often domestic places of plant-human encounters—the “settings” of the plant stories—include yards, gardens, woods, fields, kitchens, porches, windowsills, mountains, and even grocery stores; these settings broaden our conceptualizations both of what counts as an encounter with nature and of who tells our nature stories or who gets to experience “nature.”Directed focus on an individual plant or plant species highlights both that plant’s specific and unique qualities  and its agentic role in the human-plant relationship.The writing or recording of environmental stories is a way that humanities tools can be employed in the service of creating citizen-oriented projects, and, to that end, we see storytelling  as foundational to our project as both a method and a result. As we developed the “Place-based narratives” have long been used in environmental studies contexts to foster critical engagement with local landscapes and ecologies , Giulia Lepori writes about marigolds that live simultaneously in her memories of childhood in Sardinia, Italy, and in the present space of her Australian deck. Lepori begins her story in memory: “As far as I recall, my mother has been planting tagetes [marigold] every Summer in Sardinia” : the marigold uses the author’s desire to connect with her mother, with “natural agriculture,” and with the role both have played in her life to expand their range. At the end of the story, Lepori indeed extends this range to the deck outside her new home in Australia. There she moves not just physical location but from past to present as well, in the process pointing out new experiences of the seasons in her new land: “It’s Winter here,” she writes, “but out in the deck the tagetes are about to bloom.” Lepori’s story reveals a pattern prevalent in many stories shared on our site: the physical location of the plant at the center of the story is generally less important to the storyteller—and to the storyteller’s main themes—than the memories, relationships, and personal reflections the plant inspires.Lepori, travelling around the world, not only sees the plants “everywhere,” but she also facilitates their movement herself: “It’s been three years since I have been planting marigolds of many species, sharing them with my mother from all over the places.” Perhaps the story proves Michael Pollan’s point in Lepori’s story also demonstrates that movements around the globe need not make environmental attachments more shallow: in fact, her moves actually deepen her relationship with the marigold plant and encourage her to seek more knowledge about its uses. This point is reinforced again and again in stories shared to our site, where people use plants as touchstones to discuss their deepened relationship with particular places or species, regardless of location or time spent in a single place. As we read the stories on our site, we realized that this trend ran counter to the tendency in much published nonfiction environmental writing that instead privileges long-term, stable, and unchanging relationships to one particular place or region. This privileging of one kind of relationship with place in turn threatens to marginalize the voices of those who do not have the same access to one place over a long period of time: those who must move to find or maintain employment, those who do not own land or property, those who are forced to migrate because of war, climate change, or threats of violence, to take just a few examples. Instead, the environmental storytelling that happens in places like our platform challenges ideas about time in relation to depth of experience in a place. Such mobility—among plants and people—could thus be seen not as a barrier to attachment to environments but instead as an opportunity to expand the locus of environmental care and concern beyond one’s “home” place toward broader, planetary thinking.Into the Wild or Cheryl Strayed in Wild. Indeed, a persistent challenge we faced in getting members of the public to write a story for the website was a nagging concern that their experiences in the garden or with houseplants were not worthy of telling as a “nature story.”As stories posted on the site drew our attention away from a focus on place to the network of relations that thinking about a plant inspired, we shifted the site’s tagline accordingly, to “Everyone has a story to tell about a plant: What’s yours?” The new focus concretely emphasizes our citizen humanities aims to address all who see our site and encourage them to participate in its collective meaning-making while still maintaining the focus on a singular plant experience. With this change, we also hope to counter a persistent belief, especially prevalent in the popular American imagination, that to “experience nature” requires removal from one’s everyday life to a separate “natural” or “wild” space where the more-than-human world is more prominent than the human one: think Chris McCandless in Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997), and Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). The digital realm has increasingly hosted provocative challenges to defining what constitutes an experience of nature, including such grassroots groups as “Black AF in STEM” (www.blackinnature.com), and “Queer Nature” (www.queernature.com), to name just a few. These efforts cross academic, public, digital, and natural spaces, although clearly more work is needed to make the cultural shifts necessary for all to experience equal access and safety in all spaces, natural and cultural.This notion of what it means to be “in nature” is changing in both academic and in public spheres, with more attention being paid to the idea that nature has always-already been culturally constructed and imbricated in the political, social, and legal discourses of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. This drive for inclusivity in natural spaces and expansion of what counts as a “nature experience” has been ongoing in the various disciplines of environmental studies and environmental activism for decades now. Influential scholarly challenges to the wilderness ideal persistent in both the popular American imagination and in its conservation/preservation practices include William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness, Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1996), Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez Alier’s in STEM” , which hFor far too long, the voices of a vast majority of people whose experiences of nature do not fit into narrow archetypal categories like “wilderness” or “sublime” have been left out. We thus share with Gabriel Valle  the convIn her post “From Where I Sit,” author Anna Oberg  exploresbeing out there” becomes apparent only from “sitting in here” (our emphasis). That is, the pull to wander, and the corresponding environmental narrative of exploration and conquest, only gain meaning when there is “a point of return, a place to come back to” (2018). “There is no reason…to wander through the world,” she writes, “if nothing calls me back”—including the domestic insignificances she catalogues in the first part of her essay. Ultimately, she realizes “a portion of contentment”—and an ambivalent acceptance of an expanded locus of care—in “the act of finally rising, gliding across the room to pour leftover water on a dull plant.”Here, Oberg contrasts the pull of experiencing an imagined space—“whatever roamed wild in the great blue yonder”—with the “the small, insignificances of domestic life” that define her actual circumstances. For Oberg, the “away” is where she “cultivate[s] charm, fascination,” where she understands her own “place in the wilderness of the world.” The comparative mundanity of home offered, she believed, no fodder for her creative life. But as her essay explores, the tension between the familiarity of home and the mystery of away is in fact more interrelated than she earlier perceived: the perspective of “out there Ficus lyrata  tree, implying that the plant was the companion who remedied that loneliness. In the close air of a small bedroom, human and plant support each other, whether through simple companionship or the symbiotic chemical exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide: “we are able to synchronize our breathes in a way where he breathes in whenever I breathe out” (2020). When “other guests” arrive to Nguyen’s apartment, the tree is “the first thing they notice”; “he [the Ficus tree] greets them by glistening in the sunlight and reflecting the rays off of his leaves” (2020). Nguyen concludes that the Ficus tree is what transformed the relationship to the space itself: the tree “help[ed] me call my apartment home.”The prevalence of domestic settings like Oberg’s in the stories collected on our site was clear, even dominant. Such “domesticated environmental stories” represent the vast majority of our submissions. These kinds of stories privilege personal, highly specific encounters, often taking place within the walls of a home or in a public space like a street the storyteller walks daily. In domesticated environmental stories, writers extrapolate from this singular encounter to deeper meanings or larger reflections on relationships (whether between plants and people or between and among people in their lives). In “My Apartment’s First Guest,” for example, the plant fulfills a need for human connection, even community. It is in part a “sudden feeling of summer loneliness” that spurs author Taylor Nguyen  to purchHerbaria 3.0 instead most often exists close to home. And as the authors on our site recognize the profundity of these nature encounters, they enact the kinds of cultural shifts necessary toward changing those constructions of nature that would situate it far away from such tame spaces. In these ways, the stories can be one small step toward the shifts environmental historian William Cronon called for over 20 years ago in his seminal article denouncing the separation of nature from culture, “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1996): “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. … In particular, we need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home’” (p. 21). The domesticated stories on our site play a role in creating this middle ground by linking “home” with profound experiences of natural connection; they thereby expand our cultural conceptions of what can be understood as an essential contact with nature, allowing for more varieties of nature experience to emerge. Over time, these stories could also change whose stories are told, read, and remembered in the first place.As these two examples demonstrate, rather than existing “out there,” nature in the stories collected on made me put her in my shopping cart” (our emphasis). Ecelberger highlights the plant’s agency as directive over her actions: in the human telling, the plant orchestrates the encounter. Situated in a larger frame about missing past “plant friends” and their “messages,” the writer clearly views this orchid as a potential friend and/or communicative partner, one who called out to be purchased, and one who needs a bit of human tending—but who also can tend “her” human in the process.Locating stories in domestic spaces highlights rather than obscures the agency that plants possess in their relationships with humans. Perhaps this is because individual plants stand out in domestic spaces, where there tend to be fewer of them and their unique qualities are not lost in a green background. In the post above, Nguyen credits the “lively presence” of the houseplant in the corner of a bedroom for radiating “positive ambience,” for increasing “the flow of energy in the small space of my room,” for amplifying “a complete sense of well-being,” and finally, for helping “me call my apartment my home” (2020). As noted, plants in these stories are not inert bodies; rather, they are entangled in affectively charged interactions with human and other nonhuman actors. In “Message Sent in a Scent Envelope” (2019), author Dana Ecelberger describes an affective encounter with a plant that occurs at the threshold of the grocery store, turning a space for impulse purchases into an opportunity for reflection on rejuvenation and reciprocal care. The moment of entanglement is profoundly sensory—engaging first sight, then smell, and finally an imagined touch—and enables the writer to transcend what might otherwise be considered the commercialization or commodification of nature. Her encounter with a potted orchid instead inspires reflections on the plant’s own participation in the meeting: she gives it human qualities , recognizing “her” individuality in comparison with the other “decadent” orchids; it is this difference that “The story’s title makes clear another prominent theme, that of the impact of scent, and scent’s role in plants’ communication with humans. Ecelberger notes that the plant releases scent as a way of nonverbally communicating with her: she smells the orchid in an otherwise mundane environment—the kitchen windowsill, a place of chores such as cooking and washing dishes. There, the plant repeatedly sends her “perfumed hugs,” which it releases seemingly in response to the author “thinking how pretty the orchid was.” That is, in the author’s understanding, the orchid was communicating with her, even reciprocating her affection. Current research on plant communication, namely the ability of plants to communicate with both other plants and non-plants through potent volatile organic compounds (Vivaldo et al. Herbaria 3.0 site has met with a measure of success, with 117 submitted stories so far. A closer look at the submitted stories, however, shows that the site has resounded more with an academic audience than with a public one. Teachers at several institutions in the USA and Canada, for instance, have used the site for assignments involving environmental storytelling. When instructors share their assignments, we make them available on the site’s “Resource” pages. The Resources page also encourages readers to explore related sites, especially those that explore plant-human relations from different voices and creative perspectives, including art and photography. However, outreach beyond our current audiences is necessary if we are to meet our broad goal of contributing to environmental humanities’ efforts to engage diverse publics in our practices of research and artistic endeavors. We have identified one issue with connecting with this general audience: the name of the site and associated URL. Unless a person is already familiar with the term “herbaria,” it can be hard to understand—and to spell. So while “Herbaria 3.0” is a well-motivated and evocative name from an academic environmental humanities perspective, it does not evoke the same response from the general public. To address this problem, we plan to change the site URL to www.plantstories.org, and this new URL will send all visitors to the Herbaria 3.0 page as it exists now.Since its launch in 2018, the But a more fundamental issue is at stake here as well. As noted above, we have encountered a general reluctance from people to recognize that the interactions they have with plants are worthy of telling a story about. Many people, when asked to contribute to the site, defer, demurring that they have nothing important to say. By encouraging people to contribute, by telling them that these small stories are worth sharing, we can stretch the potential for environmental storytelling beyond the three points we note above. Such storytelling, we believe, has the power to illuminate environmental changes happening in real time, and, on smaller scales, to make the invisible visible Stoknes , since iAs environmental studies scholars have long understood, such local, experiential dimensions of environmental storytelling highlight the power these stories have to reveal the depth of individual attachment to places—including, in this case, the plants in those places—as well as cultivate connections between and among individuals. The situatedness of environmental storytelling likewise can play a key role in diversifying our environmental narratives at large. In elevating voices of ordinary people, such stories can not only democratize environmental knowledge-making and enrich our environmental histories, but they can also—when collected en masse—reveal how these epistemologies and histories have always already been made by those on the margins of the official narratives. As Gabriel Valle points out, the process of collecting environmental stories makes apparent that “different people have different environmental histories, produce meaning about the environment through various but equally important stories, and perform or act differently in specific environmental contexts” Valle , p. 132.Herbaria 3.0 a citizen humanities project, one that positions the site as one node in larger environmental activist work. We believe that in focusing attention on singular plants, readers and writers generate other positive environmental outcomes, such as increased care for the more-than-human world, increased knowledge about local or distant environments, and perhaps even increased activism in their home communities. With or without realizing it, everyone does indeed have some kind of story to tell about a plant—the challenge of ours and other participatory environmental humanities projects is to create a space where those stories can be told so that this potential can be fully realized.Our interest in environmental storytelling as a tool and as an artistic product in its own right is thus entwined with our commitment to making


Camillo Golgi  is one oHe was born on 7 July 1843 in the town of Corteno in the province of Brescia, Italy. Inspired by his family, Camillo Golgi began his studies in medicine at the University of Pavia, finishing them in 1865 . Since hSubsequently, due to numerous antithetical perspectives between Cesare Lombroso and Camillo Golgi, the collaboration between them ceased. This is when Camillo Golgi met a true personality of science at that time, Giulio Bizzozero (1846–1901), a well-known pioneer of histology, famous for his studies in the field of microbiology (helicobacter pylori) and for describing the platelets . The colIn 1872, Camillo Golgi became Chief of the Hospital of the Chronically Ill in Abbiategrasso, near Milan. This is where he invented, in 1873, the “Black Reaction” . Later oThe two influences exerted by his mentors, Giulio Bizzozero and Cesare Lombroso, shaped his research emphasizing the structure of the nervous system. Governed by the question “What are the cytoarchitectonics of the fascinating nervous system?”, Camillo Golgi began research in this area.In the 19th century, the general aspects regarding the morphology of the nervous cell were not entirely elucidated. Earlier that century, Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters 1834–1863) managed to demonstrate a certain continuity between the nerve cell and its extensions—axons and dendrites [3 managedThat was the moment when, in the year 1873, Camillo Golgi made a revolutionary discovery, which totally changed the trajectory of the neurological field. Camillo Golgi was studying some specimens of nervous tissue, fixed according to a new technique. Small pieces of nervous tissue were kept in aldehyde, and later they were hardened in potassium dichromate. After this, silver nitrate reacted with pieces of the specimen that have been hardened in potassium dichromate. This coloration technique was later called the “Black Reaction”—“La Reazione Nera” in Italian, or, as it is now known in the scientific community, “Golgi’s impregnation”—“Golgi Staining”.There are two advantages of using this technique: the first one is that the silver chromate will form microparticles inside the cells, while the second one is that the “Black Reaction” only impregnates just a couple of the cells inside the histological sample, in comparison with other methods. This is very useful, especially for studying the histology of the nervous system, as it allowed Golgi to easily differentiate axons from dendrites. Unlike the classical methods, the fixation by using solutions with metals determines the preferential precipitation on certain structures, through a mechanism that is not even to this day completely elucidated .A year before the invention of the “Black Reaction”, Joseph von Gerlach 1820–1896), a German anatomist, formulated the reticular theory. It claims that the nervous system would actually function as a syncytium due to the multitude of dendritic ramifications, therefore it would, in fact, function as a whole [20–1896, On the other hand, the enunciation of the reticular theory also implies the description of its rival, “The Neural Theory” (or neuron doctrine), postulated by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. It assumes that the neuron functions as a unit in itself, not as an entire system. The statement is based on studies conducted by the Spanish researcher, who observed a discontinuity between neuronal extensions, later called synaptic .Cajal was amazed by the quality of Camillo Golgi’s tissues impregnated using the Black Reaction method, and in fact, more than half of his sketches were made using this method. Moreover, Cajal even made certain improvements to the protocol . Thus, iThe debate between the two theories was the foundation of modern neuroscience, and for about a century, “The Neural Theory” was the central dogma of this field. For more than a century, the reticular theory was shadowed by the concept postulated by Cajal. However, it is important to state that glial cells were an underdeveloped subject, the spotlight being on the neurons and their morpho-physiological particularities. We believe that the truth is a comprehension of the best arguments presented by both theories, as numerous recent studies have revealed new information about the functioning of the nervous system. A functional syncytium created by gap junctions between the astrocytes has been identified. Astrocytes, in turn, can form gap junctions with oligodendrocytes as well. The bonds between the astrocytes are tightened at the level of the gap junction most often by the Cx43 protein . This fuIt is interesting to note that, in 1903, Camillo Golgi published a paper entitled “Opera Omnia”, a work in which numerous anatomical nerve structures were sketched. Among them are the cerebellum and the hippocampus , formatiOn the basis of “The Black Reaction”, Camillo Golgi published in 1874 the work “Sulla fina anatomia del cervelletto umano” . In thisIn 1878, he discovered two new types of sensory receptors. First of all, he discovered the Golgi–Mazzoni corpuscles, that encapsulate the nerve ending, being fine pressure receptors that are located only in the fingertips. These structures are similar to the Vater-Pacini receptors, except for their localization. Second of all, another discovery, which took place in 1878, was called the Golgi tendon organ, located in the muscle–tendon junction and representing a muscular proprioceptor .Starting in 1879, Camillo Golgi was appointed Professor of General Pathology at the hospital in Pavia, thus having the opportunity to study the in vivo evolution of malaria. By associating the clinical symptomatology developed by his patients with the evolution of the parasite in the blood, the researcher managed to elaborate a description of the cycle that takes place in the human erythrocyte regarding Plasmodium, now known as the Golgi cycle .Later that century, Camillo Golgi made new discoveries regarding the kidney’s histology. He noticed that in each nephron, the ascending part of the Henle loop returns back to the cortical, juxtamedullary zone. This part comes in close contact with the Malpighi corpuscle, and was later called the juxtaglomerular apparatus, important in regulating blood pressure through renin secretion.In 1898, while analyzing the Purkinje cells in the cerebellum, Camillo Golgi observed what we now call the Golgi apparatus, through silver nitrate staining. Immediately after this, he discovered that the Golgi apparatus could also be found inside the neural cells of the spinal ganglia. This event started an avalanche of adjacent research that proved the presence of the Golgi apparatus in numerous other types of structures. Initially, it was called “internal reticular apparatus”, due to the fact that, at that time, the function of the Golgi apparatus could not be stated, and it was assumed for a long time that the organelle was actually a fixation artifact. This whole situation was called “The Golgi Controversy” . This orCamillo Golgi’s prestige has been recognized by numerous international faculties and scientific societies. They paid tribute to the scientist by choosing him as Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universities of Cambridge, Athens, Paris (Université de la Sorbonne), Geneva and Kristiania (Oslo), also being a Nobel laureate in 1906, along with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an award obtained in recognition of their work regarding the structure of the nervous system.Additionally, both scientists held Nobel lectures that summarized their findings: Santiago Ramón y Cajal: “The Structure and Connexions of Neurons” and Camillo Golgi: “The neuron doctrine—theory and facts”.Despite the fact that Santiago Ramón y Cajal is proclaimed as the father of modern neuroscience because he promoted “The Neuron Doctrine”, we believe that researcher Camillo Golgi deserves at least as much recognition. Numerous recent studies justify the return of the reticular theory in the spotlight of neuroscience, bringing it back to relevancy.If Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s work is a marble statue, Camillo Golgi’s work was the podium of the statue, but also the marble block from which it was carved. “La Reazione Nera”, through the silver impregnation of nervous structures is the testament of Golgi’s genius, the gold standard for neuroscience research.


Based on these findings, we discuss how subtle manifestations of patriarchy and collectivism perpetuate sexualized violence in Greek sport as they promote a climate of silence, prevent safeguarding, maintain underreporting of sexual violence, and delayed the arrival of the #metoo. We conclude that under the current circumstances, change seems to be a threat to all involved in Greek sport, yet for different reasons. For the coaches, sport officials, stakeholders, state system, change would require them to relinquish male powers and authority, find new meaning of what it means to be and do as a man, and allow women to be seen as counterparts. For the female athletes-survivors, it would require them to prioritize the self and their self-care and let go of the in-group loyalty and subordination learned and exhibited from infancy. We also contend that mere translations of international and regional safeguarding guidelines and toolkits cannot foster awareness raising, nor the implementation of measures within cultural settings that divert from the Global North. If we care to combat the universal phenomenon of sexualized violence in sport, a glocal approach is needed, where local socio-cultural factors are acknowledged, their role is addressed, and violence is understood within its context.The present study scrutinizes the role of societal culture in cases of sexual violence in Greek sport, as presented in the media after a two times Olympic medalist of Greece fired up the “‘me too’ Movement” in the country. Specifically, data for this study consisted of 36 media articles , reporting multiple cases of sexual abuse and harassment in Greek sport and were published between January 2021 and January 2022. We drew on the cultural praxis heuristic to explore how the cultural setting operates as an underlying factor in priming athletes for harassment and abuse and in oppressing them into not speaking up. Our thematic analysis of media data revealed two overarching themes, namely,  While sexual violence is a universal phenomenon, safe sport and safeguarding athletes are not. Though forms of sexual violence in sport (like harassment and abuse) drew attention in the end of 1980s , today tBoth the magnitude and impact of sexual violence in sport, underline the importance of combating it and safeguarding athletes  to preveSexual harassment occurs in Greek sport based on findings reported by Sofia Bekatorou fired up the Greek #metoo campaign, which quickly trickled down to the milieus of performing arts and academia. The “me too” Movement was founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke with the aim to generate resources, support, and pathways that were not in place and to make healing possible for victims of sexual violence . What stAmong the social factors that characterize the Greek societal context, a common denominator preventing people from recognizing, labeling, speaking of, and responding to sexual violence may be the collectivist patriarchic society . PatriarAccordingly, the oppression of women in Greece is deeply rooted in the collective patriarchal consciousness, as the individual actions of both men and women, and the nature of their intimate relationships are affected by patriarchal biases. Traditional patriarchal beliefs about women’s subordinate roles  and how women should be treated  justify gender inequality and violence occurring inside Greek institutions; sport being one of them. In particular, patriarchy continues to shape the ways of being and doing of the men and women of Greece as traditional patriarchal beliefs are subtly hidden within family values and traditions, the teacher-centric educational approaches, or a national team’s code of conduct expecting athletes to behave with due decency and decorum toward the  representatives of the sport’s authorities. In addition to the patriarchal values and gender relations, Greek people are primed into collectivism. They are nurtured and integrated in the realm of the family , which shapes some early lived experiences within a strong, cohesive in-group that protects its members in exchange for loyalty. While the society is slowly transiting from a collectivist to an individualistic one , traditioíκω, μη εν δήμω translating as what happens at home, stays at home); defying the rule of in-group solidarity by revealing facts harmful to the group is contemptible. Sport is a strong, male-dominated, cohesive in-group, and according to The shaping of early life compelling experiences with strong in-groups that protect their members in exchange for loyalty, can facilitate the dominant patriarchal, male-centered Greek structures to silence, absorb or integrate anything alternative, and thus remain intact. People are nurtured into abstaining from sharing in-group facts with those not belonging to the group Sexual violence thrives when there is tolerance for discrimination, physical violence and inappropriate sexual behavior. Imbalanced power relations, authoritarian leadership and rewards structures create relationships based on fear and dependence and hence vulnerability to the abuse of power. The loss of “natural barriers” because of the physical contact required and the sharing of showers, changing rooms and confined spaces with adults also expose children to several forms of sexual violence. And of course, there is the scandal avoidance by organisations and individuals who prefer to hide the abuse, thus sacrificing the victim and giving the abuser a licence to harm.  of Greece toward accepting, tolerating, silencing, and concealing sexual abuse occurring inside sport? In what follows, we engage the cultural praxis heuristic  and perfTo explore socio-cultural factors related to sexual violence in Greek sport, we drew upon the cultural praxis heuristic proposed by In countries where we still lack data on sexual violence in sport and research on this topic has been met with resistance, scholars suggest that the use of secondary sources of data. Sources like media and court reports, police files, and data from criminal registers  can offeoυαλική κακoπoíηση,” “#metoo,” “αθλητ*,” “Σoφíα Mπεκατώρoυ,” and “Eλλάδα”). These key terms were selected as they reflect the phenomena , study population (athletes), and context (sport) that were of interest to this study. The term #metoo was also selected as it is a popular hashtag that athletes use when reporting experiences of sexual abuse in the media. We also decided to use the name “Sofia Bekatorou” as a search term, as in addition to firing up the #metoo movement in Greece, she has become a key figure in advocacy work related to sexual abuse and her name is often mentioned in the media in relation to other athlete-survivor stories.To identify the articles, we searched the European Newsstream database, as well as Google, using different combinations of the words, “sexual abuse,” “#metoo,” “sport,” “athlete,” “Sofia Bekatorou,” and “Greece”  in Greece for several years. Through our advocacy and scholarly work, we have tried to mobilize change for all, and women in particular and bring something back to the sports that we loved and their communities e.g., . Having Given the sensitivity of this research topic and pre-existing relations with survivor-athletes whose stories have been depicted in the media and were used in this study, our research was guided by relational ethics . Accordishelter sexual violence over female athletes and could help us understand how the walls of silence that surround sexual violence in Greek sport are built, maintained, and keep out safeguarding, our thematic analytic procedure revealed two overarching themes: (1) keeping the home intact with two subthemes, (a) holding back on change and (b) staying with the known; and (2) failed negotiations with power also with two subthemes, (a) negotiating with national and sport culture glitches and (b) preserving power. Some of the themes relate more to the collective dynamics of the environment, while other ones to individual negotiations that happen within this system. In what follows, we present and discuss the themes.The media articles that we analyzed, reported nine cases of sexual violence, in the sport contexts of athletics, gymnastics, sailing, basketball, water polo, and swimming. Perpetrators were all males in positions of power, such as federation officials, coaches, sport medics or fellow elite athletes. The victims were underage or young adult female elite athletes. Behaviors included sexual harassment in the form of unwanted sexual comments, unwanted touching and forcing the athlete to strip, as well as more aggravated forms of sexual abuse including rape  within a woman’s caretaking gendered role  meet in cultural institutions and traditions, outdated premises and practices, and (un)conscious deafness and blindness, where they interact, reconstruct, and perpetuate cultural inequalities, discrimination, and abuse. The theme of keeping the home intact, denotes that the challenges of change are not confronted yet, and that power remains on the side that it was.failed negotiations with power is about individual negotiations with glitches of Greece’s national and sport culture, along with collective acts that may well preserve power for those who have it. As negotiations with problematic aspects of the national culture we regarded situations where the individual athlete negotiates between caring for her emotional vulnerabilities and remaining silent, as well as when negotiating between remaining silent and not protecting herself or others in her sport from maltreatment and abuse. Negotiations involving the sport culture, place the individual at a juncture where she must choose between her own safety and well-being, and her Olympic dream , as well as with national- and sport-culture glitches. The decision whether to speak up about abuse and save future generation yet ruin their relationships with coaches and federation officials and therefore their athletic career, or to stay silent and continue the pursuit of their Olympic dream, is a difficult one to make. Their upbringing inside collectivism and the loyalty to family and its members  that is instilled in them appear to shape the drive to break their silence even without a safety net of proper reporting procedures.In the present study, we engaged with cultural praxis  to exploThe themes identified in this paper can be viewed as expressions of how collectivism and patriarchy are performed in everyday life . The outdated and abusive coaching, training practices reproduce and retain the supremacy of men in power. The untrustworthy, outdated system and practices preserve gender hierarchy and inequalities against women who are targeted by violence more than men and perpetuate traditional stereotypes through individual interpretations of laws performed by law enforcers. Promises on policy changes that do not happen, is an indirect way to keep things as they are and retain power and authority of men. The negotiations that athletes-survivors face are indications of a collectivist society that expects to remain “clean” of wrongdoings by hiding these (culture of silence) and a sport community that glorifies everything about men, male prowess, and male dominance. Lastly, the theme of preserving power is the ultimate illustration about how male authority is retained through wrongdoings, such as violence and corruption.While this study is based on a rather small number of national and international articles, that concerned nine cases of sexual violence in Greek sport published between January 2021 and January 2022, it is crucial to note here the absence of research on sexual violence in Greece. The fact that since The findings presented here are in congruence with previous scholarly work  that linThe data generated and analyzed during this study are included in this published article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.SC initiated and led the study, wrote the manuscript, identified the focal area, reviewed the literature, was a critical friend in data analysis, and shaped data interpretation and the development of findings. AK collected and analyzed the data as a specialist on cultural praxis, was instrumental in the development of findings, and wrote the manuscript. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.


The role of feminism in eating disorders research, treatment, and advocacy continues to be debated, with little agreement in sight about the role—or lack thereof—of feminist eating disorders work. In these debates, the opportunity to open fruitful conversations about eating disorders that generate new possibilities for researching, treating, and preventing them is missed. This article is the second in a series of two papers that invite such a discussion. In this article, we focus on five key contributions that feminist eating disorder work has made and can make moving forward. These are contextualizing treatment, attending to lived experiences, expanding the meanings of “sociocultural influences,” diversifying methodologies, and situating recoveries. We do not propose to offer a “final word” on feminisms and eating disorders, but instead to start conversations about how we understand, research, and treat eating disorders. There continue to be debates about what role, if any, feminism has to play in eating disorders research, treatment, and advocacy. In these debates, we sometimes miss the chance to engage in productive dialogue about what the past and present of feminist eating disorders research, treatment, and prevention can offer—and where it might grow. This article, the second in a series of two papers that invite such a discussion, focuses on five key contributions that feminist eating disorder work has made and can make moving forward. These are: considering treatment in context, attending to lived experiences, thinking about the meaning of “sociocultural influences,” broadening our approaches to doing research, and considering recovery in context. We do not intend this work to offer a “final word” on the role of feminisms for eating disorders. Instead, we want to spark and continue conversations about how we understand, research, and treat eating disorders. This is the second in a two-part series in which we invite readers to join us in the process of answering the broad question “What can feminism(s) offer the eating disorders field?” Part 1 addressed misconceptions about feminist approaches by articulating the assumptions and principles that make an approach “feminist.” In this paper we proceed to explore in more detail what feminist approaches can offer the scientific endeavor to understand, treat, and prevent the spectrum of eating disorders while minimizing harm to individuals and redressing pernicious practices such as weight stigma that have been deeply embedded in psychology, medicine, and other sociocultural systems. We note here, and will address later, the fact that a vast majority of feminist work on eating disorders revolves around anorexia nervosa, a significant limitation that needs to be addressed as we move forward.In Part 1 , 3, we iThus, in Part 1, we argued that feminist approaches, in being attuned to power-inequalities, invite us to take contextualizing and empowering approaches to research, advocacy, and treatment. To emphasise that point we considered one of critical feminism’s key contributions to the eating disorder field—its unpacking of diagnostics by situating distress within sociocultural contexts that hold  certain bodies to particularized and narrow standards.In Part 2 we highlight five more areas in which feminist approaches to eating disorders offer insights that might be leveraged to address problematic areas in the eating disorders fields, including omissions and tenacious inequities. These are contextualizing treatment, attending to lived experiences, expanding the meanings of “sociocultural influences,” diversifying methodologies, and situating recoveries. We do not address prevention in detail here because there is a substantial body of literature elsewhere that reviews the theories, methodologies, and findings of feminist approaches –7.Feminist work has the potential to support empowering and impactful therapeutic work with those struggling with an eating disorder. Many approaches to treating eating disorders that have been accorded the seal of evidence-based approval, including family-based treatment, are actually based in some elements of feminist therapeutic approaches , with moFeminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders [Early feminist therapists/authors blended traditional psychodynamic approaches with a “narrative of political empowerment”  and specisorders  was publNearly 30 years later that potential has not really come to fruition. This outcome reflects a number of complex historical and political factors, including the dominance of patriarchal structures and the hegemony of a narrow, biopsychiatric view of “science.” In a landscape of eating disorders treatment characterized—in part due to budgetary constraints—by broader trends toward short-term efficiency, reified as “evidenced-based” “managed care” , there iThere are, of course, still feminist therapists working in eating disorders treatment today, as well as treatment centres established on firmly feminist grounds, although explicitly feminist-oriented eating disorder treatment centres are rare, particularly in the UK and North America. In 1976, in the UK, Susie Orbach co-founded and established the Women’s Therapy Centre (WTC), which seeks to place and treat eating disorders within the context of women’s cultural experiences [Very little empirical data exist on the extent to which feminist questions of gender, and other intersecting factors, are substantially or effectively  addressed within clinical contexts. Many programs purport to focus on the needs of women. However, they do not publicize their approach as “feminist,” nor do they advertise any details about feminist components such as developing a critical social consciousness in explorations of the construction and enforcement of gender roles. What scant evidence exists indicates that these issues feature very little in the training of health professionals working in eating disorders  and in psocial influences is addressed in treatment, this tends to be specifically around body image work or aspects of media literacy, perpetuating the idea that those experiencing eating disorders are somehow more ‘vulnerable’ media consumers [Patients, however, have reported wanting to address and explore issues of gender and sexuality in treatment, only to find that such requests may be dismissed or ignored due to therapist resistance, inadequate training, and/or insufficient expertise , 25. Wheonsumers . This lionsumers . ScientiFeminist work that carefully analyzes existing eating disorders treatment provides insights into the places in which feminist approaches can offer significant improvements in the delivery and evaluation of care. Eating disorder treatment “as usual” has been critiqued in the feminist canon for inscribing rules around food that are as rigid as those adopted in eating disorder practices [e.g., around timing and content of meals; not mean.Feminist scholarship, and in particular post-structuralist feminist work, tends to be critiqued for not proposing concrete “solutions,” specifically for focusing instead on deconstruction—how language and conceptual systems shape meanings, while tending to privilege certain groups as having the authority to speak, write, and influence. However, a close reading of feminist critiques reveals productive directions for treatment informed by a feminist lens. We begin our consideration of some of these critical analyses by exploring what taking a feminist approach to treating eating disorders does not mean designing any of the following: treatment only for women or treatment that vilifies men; treatments that exclude cis men, trans men or women, or non-binary people with eating disorders; interventions focusing only on body image and media objectification of bodies; programs that intentionally employ only women as treatment directors or staff; or those ignoring a restoration of nutrition. On the contrary, feminist propositions for treatment include: 1. “shifting clinical interventions toward contextual variables” [Specifically, in our view, feminist approaches should riables” , p. 189 riables” , p. 326;riables” , p. 326;riables” ); and 5.riables” , p. 92. riables” ), takingsocial” in nature [From a feminist perspective, collaborative care necessitates a centring of the individual’s experience. Doing this meaningfully requires a deep and tightly held commitment to working with the person in the context of a respectful relationship that emphasizes power-sharing wherever possible . This stn nature . Once agvaluing the lived experiences of people with eating disorders or their families. While much feminist work has been qualitative in nature and may aim to “give voice” to lived experiences, almost all research studies are conducted in a way that continues to privilege the interpretation of the researchers and thus arguably gives little back to the participants [interpretations of participants’ voices. Notably, although feminist research can be qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods, the “feminist” aspect refers to the “political commitment” involved in the process of exploring and ultimately transforming oppressive systems  may limit  a person's ability to re-imagine non-eating disordered subjectivities [A look at feminist eating disorder literatures reveals how viewing people as tivities . We acknMichael White’s  reflectiThe Anorexic Self deals quite explicitly with such dilemmas. Rather than assuming that either voice (that of “the person within” or “the eating disorder”) is “true” or “correct,” an approach such as Saukko’s [This person-driven perspective on externalization of “the voice” is important in light of critiques of the ways in which, just like subsuming people’s identities into “the anorexic” might limit possibilities for re-writing the self , so too Saukko’s  invites Thus, a feminist lens enables consideration of how, in its deployment in clinical settings, a focus on “the eating disorder voice” may insufficiently address the confluence of different aspects of the multiple “voices” or discourses involved in constituting subjectivity , 46. An explore that construction, and in the process illuminate the ways in which we all are wrestling with similar and diverse sociocultural forces that shape our understandings and experiences of bodies, desire, emotions, identity, control, and self-in-relationships.In popular forums, presenting the person experiencing this distress as being “ruled” by their eating disorder may lead to unintentional constructions of people with eating disorders as little more than a “cultural dupe”  or even within a person but how various people constituting the eating disorders “field”  interact with others and their surroundings to construct particularized—and not always helpful—versions of self and subjectivity. The fact that eating disorders often develop during adolescence and early adulthood, when individuals’ sense of themselves, their gender, and their sexuality will likely be undergoing rapid change and when others’ perceptions of them will similarly be shifting, make this feminist attention to multiple, shifting, contextualised perceptions and voices particularly pertinent. Practically, a feminist perspective on voice and externalization invites an avoidance of assuming that “the voice” or “Ed” is an approach that all will resonate with—or that it is primarily internal and individual, that is, “intrapsychic.” Instead, a feminist perspective encourages the person to re/construct (re/author) their own story—and thus their own self—in relation (or not) to their own contextual and individual experiences [In this regard, we have long known that, like most or all people, people with eating disorders are conscious of how they are perceived, including how people perceive them in relation to their eating disorders or an idea of what an eating disorder “is” . Engagineriences .Feminist scholars , 24, 49 must contend with the determinants of how social, political, and economic power flows in, through, and around us all. Attending to these power dynamics and people’s individual circumstances within treatment, prevention, research, and advocacy settings means making space for people’s differences and their similarities to be named and honoured.In their critical feminist analysis Nasser and Malson  maintainCertainly, we may observe and reasonably apply patterns in what people say about their eating disorders and how people articulate their experiences of recovery. However, finding a singular truth about “the lived experience” of an eating disorder is an impossible exercise. A critical feminist approach invites us to acknowledge and honour diversity (both within and across the various categories of eating disorder) as we consider how these articulations will always draw in part on the cultural repertoires people use to understand and articulate themselves. Moreover, the research encounters in which these articulations are generated and shared will themselves be laden with power , 53, 54.Fundamental differences in thinking about and applying research methods contribute significantly to the chasm between much of the critical feminist eating disorder literature and eating disorder literature “in the mainstream.” When critical feminist work uses methodologies that are not legitimized in certain contexts , this ostensibly “unscientific” work is desk-rejected or subject to peer reviews which ask the work to be put into boxes  into which it does not sit easily or, arguably, belong at all. The role of qualitative research—which has structured much but not all of feminist work—has been a key issue here. This section carefully examines the positionality and contributions of critical feminist approaches to methodology in order to foster new ways of engaging in eating disorder research.The contention that all research is situated within a power-laden, politicized set of sociocultural forces means that there are legitimized, socioculturally specific ways of “seeing and doing things,” which are practiced by recognized professionals (“experts”) working in prestigious hospital/academic settings. If we accept this argument, or at least are committed to exploring and learning from it, we are on our way to engaging with critical feminist approaches to research. There are critical feminist roadmaps for how to go about this, though their signposts may be less explicit than those stemming from either positivist approaches (strictly empiricist) or post-positivist critiques of bias and politics in science.A significant majority of the research in medicine and the social sciences on eating disorders is quantitative and/or based in positivist and post-positivist paradigms. These studies set out hypotheses  about eating disorders. The researchers then engage in data collection and analytic methods that seek verification, that is, to determine whether or not these null/hypotheses are likely to be “un/true.” These approaches to eating disorders research typically presume that 1. there is a set of objective criteria emerging from the empirical data that will reveal and/or verify whether or not someone has or has had a “legitimate” eating disorder; 2. any number of other theoretically or practically relevant variables might be similarly defined and measured in order to subject their relationships with “legitimate” eating disorders to falsification/verification; and 3. therefore, the predicted “real” relationships between these variables can be illuminated, leading to “facts,” and hopefully to principles, if not laws, much like those in physics and chemistry.This distillation does not in any way minimize the importance and sophistication of various research techniques used to explore eating disorders. Nevertheless, the basic premise that underlies this approach, typically configured as “mainstream”, is that some truths or ways of knowing are “objective” and move us in the direction of compiling “scientific facts.” Therefore, in our most definitive studies we must do everything we can to control for “contaminants” that would lead to a lack of clarity and cogency in the interpretation of the findings, thereby disrupting the overall direction of progress.Taking a critical feminist stance on eating disorder research often  rejects these “scientific” truisms. Poststructuralist feminist eating disorder work in particular operates on the assumption that singular, absolute “truths” do not exist, and that research is embedded within and is thus influenced by the very systems it seeks to explore and/or critique. This approach often does away with the assumption that diagnostic criteria are objectively measurable manifestations of an underlying disease entity. Thus, research based on that assumption is questioned in terms of whether it has “actually” said anything about “real” eating disorders. This critique of a narrow application of what constitutes “science” is, not surprisingly, a major source of resistance to feminist work on eating disorders.have received a diagnostic label for their eating distress. It is still possible, in this research, to invite participants to share their experiences (including “outcomes”) in relation to how they were framed and cared for, for instance, in eating disorder treatment [However, given what we know about barriers and exclusions that keep people from obtaining diagnoses of and treatment for eating disorders –57, can reatment , 58, 59.standard positivist thinking and designs for constructing and evaluating prevention and for thinking about general and specific risk factors [There are numerous ways of engaging in eating disorder research within a critical feminist perspective. Over the course of 30 years feminist scientist-practitioner Niva Piran has written and spoken extensively about her participatory-relational-empowerment approaches to prevention and to research on female development. This network of theory and methodologies features traditional academic forms of quantitative and qualitative studies, while it operates well outside  factors , 7, 60.  factors  feministLaMarre and Rice  worked wcoherence in responses, Levy et al. [These studies openly engaged with the “stuff” of qualitative analyses in interaction with researcher subjectivities. Levy, Halse, and Wright  took thiy et al.  applied y et al.  ideas aby et al.  concept This and other examples of engagement with interviewing and other research encounters as more than a simple exercise of systematically asking, answering, and sorting responses into intelligible truths, offer new ways of thinking. These methods can produce information, ideas, and insights that do not “fit” within dominant understandings, while improving the researcher-participant/patient dynamic. And, perhaps because the “findings” that result are “uncontrolled” and “unfit” in the classical sense, they contain important potentials. They can transform in fundamental ways what “we”  “know to be true” about eating, bodies, and health , expandiIn addition, there is a tradition from the earliest days of feminist writings and beyond , 46, 66 truly “gives back” to them in ways that result in positive personal, professional, and social change.We emphasize that, even as feminist research methods advocate for broadening and deepening the expanse of “evidence-based” knowledge, there is no requirement for all researchers and clinicians to abandon working suppositions about what constitutes a “true” eating disorder or even certain criteria for “good research.” Rather, what critical feminist studies of eating disorders tend to hold in common are four themes that we see as productive for eating disorders research more broadly and as fundamental to both research ethics and scientific humility. The first is the need for self-critical and public reflection on the power involved in all research processes. Second, it is crucial to consider, over and over, who is encouraged to speak up and get involved in research and who is not, by assessing the awareness people in general and people with eating disorders in particular have about what constitutes a “real” eating disorder. Third, and along the same lines, researchers, whether or not they are also clinicians—and especially if they are educators and supervisors—have an ethical and professional obligation to keep exploring their own subjectivity and assumptions about eating disorders and the people who experience them. Finally, to promote the embodiment of people with eating disorders and other research participants as people with the same kinds of needs and anxieties as we have, it is important to design and conduct research that collaborates with participants and produces knowledge that Continuing with the thread of situating eating disorder research and its findings within a sociocultural surround, we now consider how feminist eating disorder work invites a consideration of “what we are aiming for” in eating disorder treatment. This aspect of the feminist paradigm is very important because, even within more mainstream approaches, eating disorder recovery is ill-defined beyond a general agreement that recovery constitutes symptom remission plus something more , 68. Femwithout low BMIs presenting with severe eating disorders  we are People in recovery may present particularized versions of recovery that align only somewhat or not at all with broader discourses, not only about “proper” health, but also, for instance, “proper” femininity, gender identity, sexuality, and/or ethnicity , 75. Taknot recover, or at least not in “expected ways” [Critical feminist work on eating recoveries invites us to consider, for example, the therapeutic and other relational networks that enable recovery to happen . Given ted ways” , 71. Femed ways” . Taking ed ways” , 78. Fored ways” .both “mainstream” and feminist spaces tend to represent those stereotypically legitimized as having eating disorders, and particularly those diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. More research is needed that affirms the importance of conducting studies—of risk factors, symptoms, assessment, stages of the disorder, treatment, etc.—that include those with lived experiences outside of dominant young, White, thin, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual norms [Although there is great value in understanding and incorporating feminist approaches to eating disorder research and treatment, as with all approaches they are not without limitations. In line with broader critiques of feminism since its second wave, feminist work on eating disorders has not been immune to the ways in which Whiteness is a taken-for-granted norm in the broad eating disorders field . Particial norms , 80, 81.Further, feminist work shares an over-focus on anorexia-like restricting, ascetic behaviours that have led to emaciation both historically and currently , 82, 83.The major theme of this set of two articles is an invitation to researchers, scholars, clinicians, and those with lived experience of eating disorders to join us in a dialogue about the contributions, potential contributions, and shortcomings of feminist approaches. The time is right.We have argued that, for three major reasons, feminist approaches to eating disorders need to be better understood. First, they have been ignored, misunderstood, and/or treated as a straw woman in critiques. Second, they still matter—perhaps now, more than ever—because traditional and non-traditional research methods converge in their findings that people who are marginalized, oppressed, and victimized in various sociocultural ways are at high risk for many psychological and physical illnesses, including the spectrum of eating disorders.Third, as feminists in the field we respect and benefit from the tremendous contributions made by mainstream eating disorders and body image researchers over the past 45–50 years. Nevertheless, as feminists we believe that scientific accuracy and humility call for an acknowledgement that even our best cognitive-behavioral and neuroscientific approaches to etiology and treatment leave too much unknown, too many people suffering, and far too many excluded from the current processes that comprise identification, referral, treatment, and support. Feminist approaches can serve as useful guides for collaboration, creativity, and increased productivity in the science(s) of eating disorders. These approaches have very specific implications for attending to lived experiences through greater use of participatory research, for contextualizing treatment, prevention and advocacy by expanding the meanings of “sociocultural influences,” for situating and understanding recovery, and for diversifying methodologies.not follow that those committed to increasing research on understanding, preventing, and treating anorexia nervosa should ignore or demean feminist approaches. In fact, the treatment of anorexia nervosa and the phenomenon of relapse remain problematic in many ways, and feminism has a great deal to offer in thinking about empowerment of people with eating disorders and their families, the strengths and limitations of neuroscience  health.not anti-scientific, and that it is not anti-scientific to interrogate, criticize, and even challenge the ways in which medicine, psychiatry, clinical psychology, neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social work, etc., are practiced. Feminism is a different paradigm within science, as well as within other disciplines, ranging from art history to medieval religious studies to economics. As a paradigm its various perspectives provide the encouragement, the tools, and the body of knowledge that invite us to question research practices themselves and the philosophies and theories that implicitly or explicitly shape how we “see” eating disorders—and thus what we don’t “see” [We reiterate that feminism is ’t “see” . That isWe are not asking or exhorting everyone who reads this paper to become a feminist eating disorder researcher and/or treatment provider. Rather, we invite readers to consider asking themselves about any type of resistance that might have come up while reading, and invite conversation about those spaces of tension. Our hope is to generate lively conversations about the commitments we all hold in doing this work, and to re-imagine, together, affirmative ways forward that are rooted in the lived realities of the heterogeneous group of humans, including perhaps ourselves, who experience distress in their bodies and around food. Hopefully, these conversations will arise or continue in supervised training, graduate education, the pages of journals, conferences, and other relational spaces where the field(s) of eating disorders are maintained and transformed.