Book chapters written by Emma Palmer
My most recent chapter is entitled, 'Motherland – otherland – motherhood – otherhood' and will be included in the upcoming book, ‘Maternal Ecologies: Feminist Practices of Motherhood, Land, and Creativity,' edited by Jessie Carson, Jodie Hawkes and Pete Phillips. It will be published by Demeter Press in the summer of 2026.
Info from the publishers: This anthology explores the interconnections between the maternal, the land, and ecology through ecofeminist and interdisciplinary creative practices. It reimagines mothering as an ecological and relational practice shaped by place, history, and environment. The editors, writing from geographically distant contexts, invited contributors to examine how maternal identities intersect with colonialism, migration, ecology, and creative practice. Across fourteen chapters, artists and scholars use performance, storytelling, dance, poetry, and visual art to illuminate maternal experiences as ecological, political, and embodied. The book highlights how mothering can foster kinship beyond the human, challenge boundaries between culture and nature, and serve as a form of environmental activism. Divided into three sections – Embodied Ecologies and Maternal Landscapes, Storytelling, Ritual, and Eco-Relational Pedagogies, and Ecofeminist Lineages and Radical Belonging – the anthology foregrounds maternal creativity as a site of care, resistance, and renewal amid ecological crisis, inviting readers to reimagine belonging and connection to earth.
I am also currently working on a chapter for an upcoming anthology on relationality, reconnection and our ancestors, to be published in 2026 or 2027. Previous book chapters I have written are detailed below.
'Holding hope, letting go'. This chapter is in PCCS Books, 'Holding the hope: restoring psychological and spiritual agency in the face of Climate Change', edited by Diane Parker, Catherine Jackson and Linda Aspey, which was published on 16th March 2023. Here's some info about the book from PCCS's website:
"Catastrophic climate change and the growing reality of the destruction of Earth’s ecosystem and species extinction hang over us all. These topics are increasingly coming up in the work of all talking therapy professionals – counsellors, psychotherapists, coaches and psychologists. They must be able to hold their clients’ and communities’ emotions and responses – fear, anger, denial, grief, helplessness and hopelessness – and manage their own.
The chapters in this thought-provoking, honest, moving and sobering book explore the frameworks, theoretical constructs and ways of working talking therapists have devised to hold hope and build agency in the face of this immensity of complexity, uncertainty and injustice. Contributors from a range of cultural backgrounds and professional disciplines discuss our inter-relationships with the natural world, indigenous practices and understandings, how to face the reality with our children and young people, how to go on practising at the edge of despair, and much more."
'By the time I'm 30'. A chapter on being childfree by choice from, 'Reflections on motherhood, volume II', edited by Barbara Morgan. Published by the Coming Home Press in 2021.
'Dirty secrets, ecocide and the specialness of the world all around'. A chapter from, '#MeToo - Counsellors and psychotherapists speak about sexual violence and abuse', edited by Dr. Deborah A. Lee and myself, Emma Palmer. Published by PCCS Books in 2020.
