In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

In the context of art and literature, the term "weird" refers to a sense of anxiety or terror regarding an ecological force seemingly acting on indeterminate motivations with little or no concern for people. A diversity of factors contributed to the 1890s flourish of the weird, including the growing economic investment in environmental policy, the rise of popular occulture, and the strong general interest in the biological, geological, meteorological, and astronomical sciences that were inspiring new notions of, among other subjects, the possibility of nonhuman consciousness. While not part of an overt environmentalist initiative, the weird nevertheless brings forward perspectives on animal, vegetal, and atmospheric ontology in which natural elements are subjects worthy of recognition and respect. The fin-de-siècle weird was driven not by the question of what protections or rights should be extended to nonhuman elements of the ecologies in which we participate, but rather, more disconcertingly for many, by considerations regarding what agency these other forces – many mysterious or yet unrecognized – enact and perhaps even assume for themselves.

The chapter begins with a brief genealogy of new materialism and inquiry into the significance of the nonhuman stories entangled in the ethical, political, scientific, and theoretical complexities of the Anthropocene. It first explains the convergence of the new materialism(s) and environmental humanities on ecologically engaged collaborative thinking in responding to bioethical, socio-cultural, and scientific questions that arise from the challenges of Anthropocene. It then discusses how new materialism has espoused the postmodern and poststructuralist disclosure of the link between the dualistic conceptions of the world and the traditional realist systems of representation. The broad argument is that the significance of the agentic capacity of matter in producing layers of expressivity has undermined the established credo about storytelling being uniquely all too human. The “nonhuman story” is argued to mark an important shift in the foundational notions of narrative and storytelling. Material ecocriticism re-envisions narrative as the signifying agency of living matter or narrative agency. Material ecocriticism sees the world as a site of narrativity where narrative agencies – the building blocks of storied matter – demonstrate some degree of creative experience.

Most books on the psychology of women are based on a Western perspective. International students and scholars question the validity and relevance of the theories and practices that focus on a restricted population of women and ignore the diverse experience among women within and across countries based on the intersection of sex, gender, sexuality, and social locations. How can we have a universal psychology of women that routinely ignores most of the women in the world? To answer this question, we assembled teams of writers from different regions of the world or familiar with different cultures. We realized that some regions of the world may not have enough quality psychological research to be represented, but we strived to get as broad a coverage as possible. The result is a coherent picture of women’s lives in places that have been underrepresented in the mainstream literature. Gender disparity and inequity prevail in all cultures with common mechanisms. A gender-sensitive and culturally relevant psychology can identify strategies and programs to accelerate global progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #5 on gender equality. Where relevant research is available, culture-specific aspects of the topic are featured to highlight the gender issues of concern to particular regions or cultural groups. We believe that the diversity in the range of perspectives included in the chapters through the lenses of authors originating from different cultures will enrich the learning experience of readers.