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The article engages with Julie Stephens (2011) book, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking, which argues for a 'regendered' feminism to counter the current postmaternal and neoliberalist focus on paid work to the detriment of relationships of care. Stephens points to ecofeminism as illustrative of a potentially new form of maternalism which could achieve this. While broadly agreeing with Stephens's diagnosis of neoliberalism as amplifying the impoverishment of relations within natural and societal worlds, I contest her construal of ecofeminism and care ethics to maternalism. Instead, I propose a concept of embodied care that speaks to the ecofeminist imperative to support a radical restructuring of social and political institutions such that they focus on more-than-human flourishing. This is not to argue for a form of regendered maternalism, but neither does it seek to cast maternalism as something to be transcended. Rather, an approach to care that foregrounds connectivity and entangled materialisations provides an ethical resource to confront the dead hand of neoliberalism and a starting place from which to re-figure the postmaternal through a radical and liberatory focus on embodied relatedness.

This article offers a narratological reading of two 'ecopreneurial' self-narratives to demonstrate how individuals achieve a relatively coherent sense of self-identity by connecting the discursively available world 'out there' with 'inner selves'. The narratives of ecopreneurs, who claim to be motivated by the creation of social and environmental value over economic value, provide an appropriate empirical platform for this work because ecopreneurs have to negotiate between sets of discourses and social groups relating to the environment and to enterprise which are particularly conflicting. An analysis of the structure and shaping of these narratives demonstrates that narrators draw on a range of such discourses, each of which is felt as essential to a sense of self. These provide underlying scaffolding, within which narrators position characters of self and others. However, this identity positioning reveals existential dissonances resulting from combining conflicting environmental and business commitments. As they attempt to reconcile such conflicts, their appraisals of the same behaviours and values shifts at different points in the narratives, according to whether they attempt to identify themselves with, or against, the characterization of their others. Furthermore, they also employ strategies of distancing and deflection to negotiate a narrow, twisting path between binary oppositions into which they jettison what might disrupt the narration of a coherent identity.

English
The concepts of evidence-based practice (EBP) and continuing professional development (CPD) can be seen as responses to similar challenges to professionalism, centred around the need to maintain expertise. However, there is little awareness of the former outside the health and social policy fields. This article presents empirical research conducted with professional bodies to explore how CPD could become more evidence-based while, at the same time, providing an effective vehicle for putting evidence into practice. From the findings, a model is developed that demonstrates how research evidence can be combined with other important elements of professionalism to inform professional judgement.