| Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies Renowned feminist development scholar Wendy Harcourt offers the first incisive open access overview of how the lively feminist debates on care, in both minority and majority worlds, are crucial for critical development studies.
Adopting an intentionally open and readable style to ensure its technical terms are understood, each chapter starts by narrating nonfictional, on-the-ground stories-stories selected from different places, peoples, and histories-in order to show how care is understood in feminist economic debates on key subjects such as social reproduction analysis; interspecies relations in posthumanism; environmental justice in feminist political ecology; and reciprocity and accountability in postdevelopment and decolonialism. In each chapter, these sketches are then fleshed out through a critical survey of influential thinkers and activists who adopt ecofeminist, feminist political ecology, critical indigenous studies, transition studies, postdevelopment, and decolonial approaches to development.
This book-alongside the illustrations, vlogs, and social-media messaging that accompany it online- provides researchers, students, practitioners, and activists with the tools to explain why care is such a crucial concept for critical development discourse.
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| Earthcare ‘Earthcare’ is a term that is emerging in environmental humanities from feminist and indigenous research and practice that aims to capture the historical relations of care between humans and nature. By bringing together the terms ‘earth’ and ‘care,’ ’Earthcare’ refers to the life-making and life-sustaining activities that maintain humans and more-than-humans in their lifeworlds. I use the term ‘care’ to mean the social, political, ecological, and embodied processes necessary to nurture relationships, responsibilities, and accountabilities for flourishing lifeworlds. I use the term ‘Earth’ to refer to all aspects of life on the planet. Caring for the Earth, or ‘Earthcare,’ is for humans to be aware of and take responsibility for devastating human impacts on the rivers, seas, forests, soils, and the animals on a shared planet. The term ‘Earthcare’ challenges capitalocentric narratives of nature as an economic source to be exploited. ‘Earthcare’ is not a grand narrative; rather, it is grounded in context and shaped by the myriad of everyday stories of survival due to care. In my exploration of the term ’Earthcare’, I engage with recent feminist and indigenous understandings as a contribution to environmental humanities interest in how humans can and should relate to the environment by accepting their co-existence with more-than-human others (Suchet-Pearson et. al. 2013). |
| The Ethics and Politics of Care: Reshaping Economic Thinking and Practice As the Covid pandemic and unprecedented ecological change unsettle our lives, the growing public awareness of care is reshaping economic thinking and practice as we emerge from the pandemic but find ourselves in deepening social reproduction crises and the ongoing climate crisis. Feminist economists have long identified that unpaid care work forms the basis for social reproduction or the unseen work through which capitalist economies and societies are reproduced. Even if the act of care is central to relationships and fundamental to our survival and wellbeing, it is too often taken for granted, invisible, not counted as productive or profitable, and carried out mostly by women, people of colour, immigrants, or other marginalised groups. This article reviews some current feminist economic thinking and practice that call for paying greater attention to ethics and practice of care as a way to build economies based on social justice, environmental sustainability, and collective well-being. It shows how this vision of better welfare, healthcare, care for children and the elderly, education and housing by neighbourhood networks and sustainable ecological practices is necessary for greater economic wellbeing and equity. |
| The politics of knowledge: Feminist strategies for transformation In my commentary, I take up the challenge of finding an academically fuelled strategy to make the necessary deep inroads into the Sustainable Development Goals by looking at lessons learnt from the struggles of the transnational feminist movement involved in UN multilateral debates and the transformative work of feminist political ecology on the ethics of care and caring-with others, including more-than-human others. I propose these feminist strategies offer some insights in how to shift dominant knowledge systems. |
| Rethinking life-in-common in the Australian landscape This commentary reflects on the shifts in my personal and political lifeworld across time and space by sharing a story of changing awareness about ‘life-in-common’ in the Australian landscape; a landscape that is marked by historical, ecological and resource struggle and injustice. My commentary takes up the rethinking of differential belonging and ‘life-in-common’ as part of the search for alternatives to capitalism and a way to overcome socioecological crises which pays attention to the deep connections of nature and culture. I reflect on life-in-common as an Australian white settler feminist political ecologist wishing to understand how to address the erasures and violence that mark the Australian landscape. |
| Feminist Political Ecology practices of worlding: Art, commoning and the politics of hope in the class room In the paper I argue that in a world where our lives are intricately interconnected and our environments are rapidly changing, commoning produces ecological imaginaries and understandings of places that could build a sense of global commons based on mutuality, reciprocity, and relationality. In exploring commoning in the international class room, my paper contributes to on-going dialogues community economies and feminist political ecology in the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), and the newly formed EU project Well-being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity (WEGO). In the article I first set out how I use commoning in my teaching. In section two I present my methodology, followed by section three where I present the community economies research network. In section four I present a case study of how I employ the community economies iceberg diagram in my teaching process using drawing /art-making to create an emergent commons-in-practice. In section five I discuss the productivity of bringing community economies and commoning to abroader feminist, ecological justice project followed by a conclusion. |
| Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Editorial to the Special Feature) Editorial for the special feature. |
| Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives This book envisages a different form of our economies where care work and care-full relationships are central to social and cultural life. It sets out a feminist vision of a caring economy and asks what needs to change economically and ecologically in our conceptual approaches and our daily lives as we learn to care for each other and non-human others. Bringing together authors from 11 countries (also representing institutions from 8 countries), this edited collection sets out the challenges for gender aware economies based on an ethics of care for people and the environment in an original and engaging way. The book aims to break down the assumed inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. The authors explore diverse understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies and pays particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. It includes strong contributions on community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others, as well as an engagement on concepts such as wealth, sustainability, food sovereignty, body politics, naturecultures and technoscience. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care is aimed at all those interested in what feminist theory and practice brings to today’s major political economic and environmental debates around sustainability, alternatives to economic development and gender power relations.
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| Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the 'Green Economy' Destined to transform its field, this volume features some of the most exciting feminist scholars and activists working within feminist political ecology, including Giovanna Di Chiro, Dianne Rocheleau, Catherine Walsh and Christa Wichterich. Offering a collective critique of the 'green economy', it features the latest analyses of the post-Rio+20 debates alongside a nuanced reading of the impact of the current ecological and economic crises on women as well as their communities and ecologies.
This new, politically timely and engaging text puts feminist political ecology back on the map.
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