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In this episode of Voices Across Waters, Svetlana Balovska Đurković speaks with Lena Penšek about ecofeminism as both a lens and a lived practice. Together, they reflect on how ecofeminism connects patriarchy, capitalism, knowledge, and care.
Lena traces her journey from early political awakening to climate justice organizing in Slovenia and Barcelona. She explains how ecofeminism expanded her activism beyond single-issue struggles and opened a broader understanding of interconnected systems of oppression.
From that process, ecofeminism became both a political framework and a way of organizing life.
Together, Lena and Svetlana explore autonomous women’s spaces, unpaid care labor, trust-building, and the radical power of storytelling.
They also reflect on how care creates the conditions for resistance and long-term political commitment.
The conversation presents the Mediterranean as both bridge and border — a sea of olive trees and tourism, but also of migration, climate crisis, and political fracture.
At its heart, this episode is a call to transform hopelessness into collective action and to build spaces where care fuels resistance.
Lena Penšek (interviewee) is a Slovenian activist and feminist, currently based in Barcelona. She organizes at the intersection of climate and social justice, transnational organizing, degrowth, solidarity, and feminism.
Svetlana Balovska Đurković (interviewer) is an anthropologist and ecofeminist queer activist from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the United States. Currently based in Croatia, she is a pioneer of the LGBTIQ+ movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina and now dedicates her work to environmental justice.
Voices Across Waters, a podcast of the Ecofeminism in the Mediterranean initiative. It uses a chain-interview format to create relational dialogue across territories, experiences, and struggles.
Research & Degrowth is an academic association dedicated to advancing research, training, and collective reflection on degrowth, ecological justice, and post-growth transformations. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, it supports critical thinking and collective action toward socially just and ecologically viable futures. Project coordination and leadership by Lena Penšek, activist and communicator of the Ecofeminism in the Mediterranean project, with visual identity and artwork by Alexandra Mestre. Find out more at degrowth.org
Efecto Colibrí helps create narratives that advance a just, diverse, and regenerative reality. It drives systemic change by transforming the stories that quietly shape our worlds. Through narrative research, co-design of systemic-change narratives, and story activation, Efecto Colibrí builds understanding, moves conversations forward, and equips teams to create change through narrative clarity in times of noise and polarization. Creative design by Ana Amrein, founder of Efecto Colibrí, together with Gonzalo Díaz, architect and editor. Find out more at efectocolibri.com/en/
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