How do the lives of women and plants intertwine in a rural ecological community in contemporary Shanghai?
On November 6th, 2025, the Inclusive Ecology Collective hosted a bilingual interactive storytelling session. Yungu Eco-Community members Chengcheng, Xiwen and Yun invited participants into the entangled worlds of plants and women, drawing on community-based ecological feminist practices in rural Shanghai.
Together, we explored how indigenous knowledge systems—rooted in local farming, medicinal herb use, and seasonal rituals—intersect with gendered experiences of care, labor, and resilience.
Participants encountered plants including dandelion, paper mulberry, and camphor, whose embodied forms and traditional applications have long been tied to women’s lived experiences, work, healing, and regeneration.
Through storytelling, hands-on sensory engagement, and co-reflection, we explored how women in rural China’s ecological communities creatively reclaim marginalized knowledge—through cultivating heritage seeds, making food-based medicine, and hosting community feasts—to regenerate kinship and ecological belonging.
Bridging botany, art, and feminist ethnography, this session honored plants and their female cultivators not merely as symbols, but as agents of relational healing and quiet subversion.