Contours of Feminist Political Ecology

GENDER, DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE
SERIES EDITOR: WENDY HARCOURT
Contours of Feminist
Political Ecology
Edited by
Wendy Harcourt
Ana Agostino
Rebecca Elmhirst
Marlene Gómez
Panagiota Kotsila
Gender, Development and Social Change
Series Editor
Wendy Harcourt, The International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus
University, The Hague, The Netherlands
The Gender, Development and Social Change series brings together path-
breaking writing from gender scholars and activist researchers who are
engaged in development as a process of transformation and change. The
series pinpoints where gender and development analysis and practice are
creating major ‘change moments’. Multidisciplinary in scope, it features
some of the most important and innovative gender perspectives on devel-
opment knowledge, policy and social change. The distinctive feature of
the series is its dual nature: to publish both scholarly research on key
issues informing the gender and development agenda as well as featuring
young scholars and activists’ accounts of how gender analysis and prac-
tice is shaping political and social development processes. The authors
aim to capture innovative thinking on a range of hot spot gender and
development debates from women’s lives on the margins to high level
global politics. Each book pivots around a key ‘social change’ moment or
process conceptually envisaged from an intersectional, gender and rights
based approach to development.
Wendy Harcourt · Ana Agostino ·
Rebecca Elmhirst · Marlene Gómez ·
Panagiota Kotsila
Editors
Contours of Feminist
Political Ecology
Editors
Wendy Harcourt Ana Agostino
International Institute of Social Studies University CLAEH
of Erasmus Montevideo, Uruguay
University Rotterdam
The Hague, The Netherlands Marlene Gómez
Freie Universität Berlin
Rebecca Elmhirst Berlin, Germany
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK
Panagiota Kotsila
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764908-
WEGO 2018-2021
ISSN 2730-7328 ISSN 2730-7336 (electronic)

Gender, Development and Social Change
ISBN 978-3-031-20927-7 ISBN 978-3-031-20928-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023. This book is an open access publication.
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Foreword
We are living in troubling times: the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

and its resulting massive loss of lives and livelihoods, combined with
ongoing climate, health, water and related crises. Feminist political
ecology (FPE) traditionally provides powerful tools that show how
environmental “crises”, environmental change and human–environment
relations are determined by power, gender, class, race, ethnicity, caste and
specific socio-economic, cultural and historical legacies (Elmhirst, 2011;
Harcourt & Nelson, 2015; Rocheleau et al., 1996). With a focus on the
wider political-economic context and both micro to macro scales, FPE
has called out injustices due to processes of allocation, dispossession and
extractivism, unequal power and gender relations and the uneven spread
of pains and gains from development processes (Elmhirst, 2018). A focus
on cognitive and epistemic justice has allowed FPE to lift invisibilised
and vulnerable voices and perspectives from the margins; voices that are
not acknowledged in dominant policy processes and mainstream knowl-
edge production (Nightingale, 2013). This book builds on FPE’s capacity
to “see multiple” and seek out diverse knowledges (Rocheleau, 2015)
as it continues to elaborate on the gendered nature of environmental
protest and activism, imagine alternative visions and engage with femi-
nist critiques of mainstream science and epistemology (Leach et al., 2015;
Rocheleau, 2015).
The book was conceptualised and written by members of the Well-
being, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity Innovative Training Network
v
vi FOREWORD
(WEGO), a group which provided the foundation for rich intergenera-

tional and situated conversations that help make sense of our troubled
times. I consider myself lucky and honoured to have been part of this
network of scholar activists that focused not only on doctoral training, but
also on action research and advocacy around communities, commons and
commoning. I learnt deeply from the often intense interactions, discus-
sions and meetings, both in person and online. By taking a multi-faceted
view of FPE, this book captures the diverse standpoints and perspec-
tives contained in the WEGO network, ranging from more traditional
political ecology issues such as extractivism, land and water to more
recent engagements around embodied experiences of pain and ageing,
the ethics of more-than-human interdependencies, indigenous ontologies
of co-becoming and feminist perspectives around degrowth, decoloniality
and pluriversality. The book is rooted in the feminist tradition of praxis,
reflexivity and a commitment to gender, social and environmental justice.
It foregrounds the importance of care for human, more-than-humans and
the planet, not least because the extraordinary loss and disruptions during
the ongoing pandemic forced researchers to become aware of the need
to care for each other, often through digital means (Di Chiro, 2017).
FPE, as conceptualised in the book’s conversations, not only explores the
ethics and politics of care in research, activism and everyday life but also
teases out the often-overlooked non-material aspects of political ecology
and degrowth (care, love, solidarity, reciprocity) that allow for human and
environmental well-being to flourish (Mehta & Harcourt, 2021). Many of
the chapters focus on aspects of care, living and being that both reset the
growth imaginary and inform radical change, contributing to visions of
societies based on caring relations, well-being and reciprocity. The book
also asks uncomfortable questions regarding unequal power and privi-
lege, for example the difficult question of who needs to and can afford to
degrow when speaking about the degrowth movement (Barca, 2020).
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, which led to the authors
moving to digital research for two years, the different chapters provide
engaging dialogues and provoking conversations across different conti-
nents, standpoints and contexts. The authors give powerful responses to
authoritarianism, racism, patriarchy, extractivism, climate crises, disease
and ageing, often in creative ways: for example, through co-curating exhi-
bitions, using artistic and visual approaches and storytelling around land,
water, food, energy and bodies. They link experiences of climate change
FOREWORD vii
with processes of extraction, exploitation and resistance in communi-

ties in the global South and North, based on their situated knowledges
and lived experiences as citizens, climate and environmental activists and
researchers. In this volume, authors deploy FPE to challenge the biomed-
ical gaze and engage with the political ecologies of health, disease and
environmental politics through situated accounts of living with chronic
pain, illness, disease and environmental injustices. The dialogues across
geographies, generations and disciplines draw on personal intellectual
journeys, histories and experiences and provide grounded insights on
diverse topics. These range from views of decoloniality, to a feminist
perspective on the controversies around global population, to inspiring
visions for non-hegemonic alternative urban energy futures, to non-
western (Andean) cosmovisions on ways of living, being and the rela-
tionships between the social and natural world.
Together the chapters push the FPE project of foregrounding multiples
ways of knowing and being, thus enabling new conceptions of politics,
justice and alternatives to dominant, capitalist development trajectories.
The book thus draws on FPE scholarship and tools to deal with contra-
dictory and difficult questions, thinking also about how transformative
research can help create more equitable and just worlds. Through its
diverse dialogues and conversations, this remarkable book is a great
contribution to the collective anti-capitalist feminist struggle against plan-
etary destruction and for a pluriverse that will allow beings to flourish and
thrive.
As Ojeda et al. (2022) state: “The powers arrayed against ecological
and social justice are formidable in their magnitude and entrenchment …
In this struggle against inequalities, injustices, degradations, exploitations,
and planetary destruction, we all need to be on the same side despite our
differences and partial knowledges” (Ojeda et al., 2022, pg. 17).
Contours of Feminist Political Ecology shows not only the depth of
those challenges but just how important it is that a passionately engaged,
feminist (academic) stance can build the foundation for conversations that
enable us to listen and learn from each other and our differences.
Brighton, UK Lyla Mehta

viii FOREWORD
References
Barca, S. (2020). Forces of reproduction: Notes for a counter-hegemonic Anthro-
pocene. Cambridge University Press.
Di Chiro, G. (2017). Welcome to the White (M)anthropocene?: A Feminist-
environmentalist Critique. In S. MacGregror (Ed.), Routledge handbook of
gender and environment (pp. 487–505). Routledge.
Elmhirst, R. (2011). Introducing new feminist political ecologies. Geoforum,
42(2), 129–132.
Elmhirst, R. (2018). Ecología política feminista: perspectivas situadas, compro-
misos emergentes. Ecologia Politica 54. Retrieved from https://www.ecolog
iapolitica.info/ecologias-politicas-feministas-perspectivas-situadas-y-abordajes-
emergentes/
Harcourt, W., & Nelson, I. L. (Eds.). (2015). Practicing feminist political ecology:
Moving beyond the green economy. Zed Books.
Leach, M., Mehta, L., & Prabhakaran, P. (2015). Sustainable development:
A gendered pathways approach. In M. Leach (Ed.), Gender equality and
sustainable development (pp. 19–-51). Routledge.
Mehta, L., & Harcourt, W. (2021). Beyond limits and scarcity: Feminist and
decolonial contributions to degrowth. Political Geography, 89, 102411.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102411
Nightingale, A. (2013). A feminist in the forest: Situated knowledges and mixing
methods in natural resource management. ACME: An International Journal
for Critical Geographies, 2(1), 77–90.
Ojeda, D., Nirmal, P., Rocheleau, D., & Emel, J. (2022). Feminist Ecologies.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources 47. https://doi.org/10.1146/
annurev-environ-112320-092246
Rocheleau, D. (2015). A situated view of feminist political ecology from my
networks, roots and territories. In W. Harcourt & I. L. Nelson. (Eds.),
Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the Green Economy
(pp. 29–66). Zed Books.
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B., & Wangari, E. (1996). A feminist polit-
ical ecology perspective. In Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter, & E. Wangari
(Eds.), Feminist political ecology: Global issues and local experiences (pp. 3–26)
Routledge.
Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies

of the University of Sussex, UK and an Adjunct Professor at the Department
of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian
University of Life Sciences. She is a mentor and supervisor in the WEGO Inno-
vative Training Network. Her work focuses on water and sanitation, forced
displacement and resistance, climate change, scarcity, rights and access, resource
grabbing and the politics of environment/development and sustainability.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the allies, friends, partners, administrators,

mentors and communities who participated in shaping this book, and the
whole Wellbeing Ecology Gender cOmmunity (WEGO)-ITN experience.
A very special thank you to Sharmini Bisessar-Selvarajah who together
with others at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus
University Rotterdam and WEGO-ITN partner institutions worked hard
to ensure the running of the project through all its trials and tribulations,
especially during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-
Curie grant agreement No. 764908-WEGO 2018-2021.
ix
About This Book
This edited book sets out the contours of feminist political ecology
that have emerged from the multi-sited, cross-generational and
inter/transdisciplinary dialogues held in the Wellbeing Ecology Gender
cOmmunities (WEGO) network over the last four years. It sets out to
show how feminist political ecology is a vibrant and engaged research
process at the intersection of feminist and environmental theory and
practice.
It covers topics that range from climate change and extractivism, to
body politics and health, degrowth, care and community well-being. The
book maps out the contours of feminist political ecology based on the
WEGO network’s original research and analysis as it links conversations
with local communities, in social movements as well as within different
academic spaces.
The book illustrates how FPE scholarship is shaped by everyday and
embodied lives within damaged, dynamic and contested environments.
Key to the book is how FPE can produce feminist intersectional and
intergenerational plural knowledges as a political and ethical practice,
recognising multiple truths, intergenerational and intersectional differ-
ences. The book is made up of a series of dialogues that navigate
theory and practice, individual and collective engagements at the edge of
academic and activist desires to produce politically meaningful knowledge
building on the insights of empirical research and feminist theory.
xi
Contents
1 Sketching Out the Contours 1

Ana Agostino, Rebecca Elmhirst, Marlene Gómez,
Wendy Harcourt, and Panagiota Kotsila
2 Untold Climate Stories: Feminist Political Ecology
Perspectives on Extractivism, Climate Colonialism
and Community Alternatives 19
Dian Ekowati, Siti Maimunah, Alice Owen,
Eunice Wangari Muneri, and Rebecca Elmhirst
3 Extracting Us: Co-curating Creative Responses
to Extractivism Through a Feminist Political Ecology
Praxis 51
Alice Owen, Siti Maimunah, Dian Ekowati,
Rebecca Elmhirst, and Elona M. Hoover
4 Ouch! Eew! Blech! A Trialogue on Porous
Technologies, Places and Embodiments 75
Ilenia Iengo, Panagiota Kotsila, and Ingrid L. Nelson
5 Ageing and Feminist Political Ecology 105
Constance Dupuis and Nanako Nakamura
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
6 More-Than-Human Co-becomings: The

Interdependencies of Water, Embodied Subjectivities
and Ethics 129
Nick Bourguignon, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still,
Ingrid L. Nelson, and Andrea J. Nightingale
7 Meanings and Practices of Care in Feminist
Political Ecology: An Intergenerational Conversation
with Khayaat Fakier and Wendy Harcourt 155
Marlene Gómez, Anna Katharina Voss, and Eoin Farrelly
8 Caring Communities for Radical Change: What Can
Feminist Political Ecology Bring to Degrowth? 177
Stefania Barca, Giovanna Di Chiro, Wendy Harcourt,
Ilenia Iengo, Panagiota Kotsila, Seema Kulkarni,
Irene Leonardelli, and Chizu Sato
9 Perspectives on Decoloniality for FPE 207
Dian Ekowati, Marlene Gómez, Iliana Monterroso,
and Ankita Shrestha
10 Debating Population in and Beyond Feminist Political
Ecology 231
Mila Fenner and Wendy Harcourt
11 La Mercadita 2050: Telling Tomorrows of a Market
After Oil 259
Lillian Sol Cueva
12 The Territory of Our Body: A Conversation on Urban
Environments in the Andes and Their Bodies 289
Agustina Solera and Mariana Jesús Ortecho
Index 311
Notes on Contributors
Ana Agostino (co-editor) has a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the

University of South Africa (UNISA) and is ombudsperson and mentor of
the WEGO Innovative Training Network. She is a Lecturer at University
CLAEH (Uruguay) in Development, Culture and Human Rights and at
FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) in Gender and Envi-
ronment. In 2022 she was a Guest Professor and Mercator Fellow at the
University of Kassel, Germany and since 2017 she is the Vice-president
of the Latin American Institute of Ombudsman Institutions.
Stefania Barca is Distinguished Researcher at the University of
Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and a mentor and partner in the
WEGO Innovative Training Network. An environmental historian and
feminist political ecologist, originally from Italy, she investigates the
labour/gender/ecology nexus in the industrial age and the politics of Just
Transition. In 2021, she held the Zennström Professorship in Climate
Change Leadership at Uppsala University, in Sweden. She is active in the
degrowth feminist network (FADA) and in the international Care Income
campaign.
Nick Bourguignon is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the
Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). He graduated from
the University of Warwick in the UK and the International Institute of
Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. His
xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
current research explores the socionatural transformations of irrigation

territories and communities linked by inter-basin water transfers in Spain.
Giovanna Di Chiro is Professor of Environmental Studies at Swarth-
more College where she teaches courses on environmental justice theory,
ecofeminism(s), action research methods, and community sustainability.
She is a mentor and partner of WEGO-ITN and co-founder and faculty
partner with Serenity Soular, a campus–community collaborative in North
Philadelphia. She is currently working on her next book Worldmaking
from the Ground Up: The Praxis of Environmental Justice.
Constance Dupuis is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network feminist researcher at the International Institute of Social
Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam where she also did her
Masters. She is currently doing a Post-Doc at McMasters University,
Canada. Her research focuses on ageing, well-being in later life and
intergenerational care.
Dian Ekowati is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the University of Brighton. She researches everyday care
discourse in the extractivist landscape titled: Gendered Analysis of Care
in Family Farms in Oil Palm Policy Discourse in Indonesia. Dian believes
in the in-between spaces of her Ph.D. research and uses autoethnography
(among other methods) to approach care in her research. Prior to joining
WEGO, she worked to support research and community projects with
CIFOR, the Sajogyo Institute and the Samdhana Institute in Indonesia.
Rebecca Elmhirst (co-editor) is Professor of Human Geography in the
Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University
of Brighton in the UK, where she teaches undergraduate courses on femi-
nist political ecology, sustainability and climate justice. She is a mentor
and supervisor of the WEGO Innovative Training Network and is co-
editor of the journal Gender, Technology and Development. Her research
focuses on everyday politics, land and livelihoods in contested environ-
ments, and she works through partnerships with colleagues in Indonesia
and Thailand.
Khayaat Fakier is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Stellenbosch University
and Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at the International
Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
from 2021–2023. Her research interests are on care, social reproduction,

gender feminisms and migration.
Eoin Farrelly is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the Department of Sociology & Human Geography, Univer-
sity of Oslo. His research examines political agonisms in initiating
socio-ecological transformations in fishing communities in Scotland. His
academic background is in the study of peace, violence and gender. He is
on the boards of BeLonG To Youth Services, Ireland’s leading LGBTQ+
youth service and the Irish Family Planning Association.
Mila Fenner is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus
University Rotterdam in The Hague. She graduated from the Univer-
sity of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. After graduating she
worked in research communication for the Food and Climate Research
Network in Oxford and TRAFFIC, an international NGO focusing on
curbing illegal trade in wild animals and plants. She has conducted field
work in India, Malaysia and Cameroon and is a part-time director and
writer for film and theatre.
Marlene Gómez (co-editor) is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative
Training Network at the division of Gender and Diversity of the Freie
Universität Berlin. Her research is on feminist political ecology and the
politics of food in urban southern Europe.
Wendy Harcourt (co-editor) is Professor of Gender, Diversity and
Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies
(ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague. She is coordinator,
mentor and supervisor of the WEGO Innovative Training Network. She
joined ISS in November 2011 after 23 years as editor and director of
programmes at the Society for International Development, Rome, Italy.
She has published a prize wining monograph, 13 edited books, and
written widely in critical development studies, gender and development
and feminist political ecology.
Elona M. Hoover is an independent researcher with a doctorate in
human geography from the University of Brighton. Her work weaves
together research, activism and poetic practices, most recently on issues
of urban commoning, emancipatory affective practices, relational ethics,
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
community-grounded food and agriculture and the feminist political

ecologies of extractivism.
Ilenia Iengo is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice
and Sustainability, ICTA-UAB. Her action research is situated in Naples,
Italy with a focus on emancipatory urban politics and imaginaries
sprouting at the intersection of transfeminism and environmental justice.
Her work is published on Environmental Humanities, Journal of Polit-
ical Ecology and Environmental Justice. She is a member of Undisciplined
Environments and Ecologie Politiche del Presente collectives.
Panagiota Kotsila (co-editor) is a Juan de la Cierva-incorporacion fellow
at ICTA-UAB where she is leading research on urban feminist polit-
ical ecology. She is a mentor and supervisor in the WEGO Innovative
Training Network and a core researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban
Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), a member of the
Undisciplined Environments collective.
Seema Kulkarni is a Mentor of the WEGO Innovative Training Network
and holds an MA degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai. She is one of the founding members of Society for
Promoting Participative Eco-system Management, Pune (SOPPECOM).
She has co-ordinated various studies and programmes around decentrali-
sation, gender and land, water and sanitation.
Irene Leonardelli is a Ph.D. student of WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the department of Water Governance at IHE Delft Insti-
tute for Water Education, in Delft, The Netherlands. Before starting
her Ph.D., she worked on several research projects related to migration
dynamics across the Mediterranean Sea and environmental migration. Her
current research examines processes of rural agrarian transformation and
water governance in Maharashtra, India, from a feminist perspective.
Siti Maimunah was awarded her Ph.D. in December 2022 from the
University of Passau, Germany as a member of the WEGO Innovative
Training Network. She is an activist and researcher working along-
side NGOs to support communities affected by extractivism projects
in Indonesia with JATAM, TKPT, and Sajogyo Institute. Her research
combines activism and academic works to understand how the config-
uration of the resource frontier through mega projects such as mining
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
and logging shaped ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality on Kalimantan

Island, Indonesia.
Iliana Monterroso holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences. She is a
mentor and partner in the WEGO Innovative Training Network and
a consultant for the Climate and Land Use Alliance, CLUA, leading a
program on resilience in Mexico and Central America. Her work focuses
on political ecology, tenure, justice and rights specially in Latin America.
Nanako Nakamura is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training
Network at the Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University,
The Netherlands. Her research focuses on care, well-being and post-
capitalist community economies, at the intersections of age, rurality and
gender in Japan.
Ingrid L. Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geog-
raphy and Geosciences at the University of Vermont. Her work on
feminist political ecology is published in Gender, Place & Culture, Envi-
ronment and Planning E: Society and Space, Geoforum, and other journals
and collections. She is a mentor and partner in the WEGO Innova-
tive Training Network and is currently collaborating on several projects
regarding feminist digital natures.
Andrea J. Nightingale is Professor of Human Geography, University of
Oslo and Research Fellow, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
and a mentor and supervisor in the WEGO Innovative Training Network.
Her current research looks at power and politics within dynamic and
unpredictable environmental change. Her interests include climate change
adaptation and transformation debates; collective action and state forma-
tion; the nature–society nexus; political violence in natural resource
governance; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation
to development, transformation, collective action and cooperation.
Alice Owen is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovation Training
Network at the University of Brighton. Alice looks at the knowledge
politics of fracking and unconventional fossil fuel extraction in the UK,
critically examining whose knowledge comes to matter in this unfolding
conflict over the environment and over contemporary democracy.
Chizu Sato teaches in the Cultural Geography group at Wageningen
University in The Netherlands. She is a mentor and supervisor in the
WEGO Innovative Training Network and was on the coordination
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
team of the 8th International Degrowth Conference: Caring Commu-

nities for Racial Change. She is co-editor of Rethinking Marxism: A
Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. Her research interests include
transnational feminism, Marxism, international development and political
ecology, where she focuses on the intersections of women, empowerment
and development.
Ankita Shrestha is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Ph.D. Research Fellow at
the University of Oslo. Her PhD thesis presents alternative views on the
“political subject”.
Lillian Sol Cueva is a Ph.D. researcher at the International Institute
of Social Studies-Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her
research uses storytelling and art-based methods to study energy futures
from a feminist perspective. Previous experience includes advocacy in
human and women’s rights, climate change, mobility, urban development
and energy.
Agustina Solera is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Prince Claus Chair
in equity and development and lecturer at the International Institute
of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague. She
completed her Ph.D. in Social Studies of Latin America in the National
University of Córdoba, Argentina. Her work bridges the critical studies
of habitat and the broad transdisciplinary field of Latin American critical
thinking.
Enid Still is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative Training Network
at the University of Passau in Germany. Before starting her Ph.D., she
studied anthropology at the University of Oxford, UK and Savitribai
Phule Pune University, India, where her research focused on the poli-
tics of hope in theatre and development practice. Her current research
employs a feminist and multidisciplinary approach to explore the entan-
glements of colonialism, agriculture and ethics, specifically their histories
and presents in Tamil Nadu, India.
Anna Katharina Voss is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innovative
Training Network at the International Institute of Social Studies of
Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has participated in volunteering
and research projects in the field of alternative agriculture, community
activism and permaculture in Europe, Africa and India. Currently she is
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
looking at the entanglements of agroecology and feminism in rural–urban

grassroots organisations and rooted networks through an FPE lens.
Eunice Wangari Muneri is a Ph.D. student of the WEGO Innova-
tive Training Network at the Institute of Development Studies at the
University of Sussex, UK. Eunice has a Master’s from Wageningen
University and from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Tech-
nology, Kenya. Eunice has worked as a micro-credit officer at a local
bank in Kenya and trained women farmers in implementing climate-smart
agriculture initiatives at a grassroots community-based organisation in
Kenya.
Abbreviations
DT Decolonial Thinking
FPE Feminist Political Ecology
WEGO-ITN Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity Innovative Training
Network
xxiii
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Open cast coal mine, overlain with images of children
who drowned in abandoned coal pits (East Kalimantan,
Indonesia) 60
Fig. 3.2 Sharing creative responses to the Extracting Us webinar
at the online POLLEN conference (2020) 62
Fig. 3.3 Solidarity postcards ready to be sent from the UK
to Indonesia (2019) 64
Fig. 5.1 Kôji making—massaging rice and kôji malt 112
Fig. 11.1 Collage “La Mercadita” by Sol Cueva, 2022 268
Fig. 11.2 Collage “Our Story” by Sol Cueva, 2022 271
Fig. 11.3 Collage “The Caravan of Wonders” by Sol Cueva, 2022 273
Fig. 11.4 Collage “New Endeavours” by Sol Cueva, 2022 276
Fig. 11.5 Collage “To be continued…” by Sol Cueva, 2022 281
xxv
CHAPTER 1
Sketching Out the Contours
Ana Agostino, Rebecca Elmhirst, Marlene Gómez,

Wendy Harcourt, and Panagiota Kotsila
Introduction
This book is a contribution to the vital response of feminist political
ecology (FPE) to global environmental, climate, health, economic and
political crises and their impact on life in all its diversity. We sketch out
how FPE is responding to these crises based on a series of multi-sited,
cross-generational and inter/transdisciplinary dialogues held over the last
four years in the Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and Community Innova-
tive Training Network (WEGO-ITN). In the tradition of FPE, the book
embraces a deliberately open-ended approach. It does not intend to define
or delimit FPE through a series of descriptive analyses of key concepts or
specific case studies, or a showcasing of new methodologies. Instead, it is
A. Agostino
University CLAEH, Montevideo, Uruguay
e-mail: anaa@internet.com.uy
R. Elmhirst
University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
e-mail: r.j.elmhirst@brighton.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2023 1

W. Harcourt et al. (eds.), Contours of Feminist Political Ecology,
Gender, Development and Social Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_1
2 A. AGOSTINO ET AL.
a series of conversations that take up the concerns and troubles that have
emerged around the WEGO-ITN collaborative process.
The book is made up of a series of dialogues that navigate theory and
practice, individual and collective engagements at the edge of academic
and activist desires to produce politically meaningful knowledge, building
on the insights of empirical research and feminist theory. The chap-
ters cover on-line exhibitions on extractivism, intimate discussions on
embodied experiences of ill health and pregnancy, discussions around
ageing and care, storytelling and emotional engagements with water and
contested academic debates around population and political protests. The
variety of situations, places and concerns illustrates in numerous ways in
which FPE scholarship is shaped by everyday and embodied lives within
damaged, dynamic and contested environments, as well as by hope in
collaborative ventures on the margins of academic practices. The book
shows how FPE as a convening space fostering vibrant and engaged
research processes at the intersection of feminist and environmental
theory and practice.
Acknowledging the importance of these embodied experiences, FPE
promotes grounded and engaged research to understand and make visible
political processes, including the emotions and embodied reactions and
responses of people and communities to economic, social and environ-
mental change. It recognises that knowledge is generated on different
scales, including day-to-day experiences. FPE is in dialogue with various
feminist and environmental justice communities, as well as the academic
M. Gómez
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: marlene.gomez@fu-berlin.de
W. Harcourt (B)
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus
University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands
e-mail: harcourt@iss.nl
P. Kotsila
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: panagiota.kotsila@uab.cat
1 SKETCHING OUT THE CONTOURS 3
community, and strives to do non-extractive research through a participa-

tory process of co-production which translates multiple experiences with
the environment with respect and care. FPE challenges us to ask: what
are the ethics and moral norms that shape our knowledge production?
How can we use that knowledge to build culturally safe and secure spaces
that recognise situated struggles, multiple imaginaries and bodily diversi-
ties? The book itself reflects this with different takes on what FPE means
in both theory and practice, hence the authors are intentionally explicit
about the context, embodied and epistemic positioning of their different
voices and experiences.
In this introduction, we first position the book’s discussions with other
FPE texts. We then look at how the book evolved from the WEGO-ITN
experience of open-ended intergenerational and inter/transdisciplinary
conversations, followed by a summary of the key themes that emerge in
the book chapters. In conclusion, we ask, ‘where do we go from here?’
and indicate some future directions for FPE research and practice.
Engaging with FPE Conversations

The conversations in Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) with which this
book engages are as broad as they are deep. We find Diane Rocheleau’s
metaphor of ‘rooted networks’ (Rocheleau, 2015) useful for capturing
the breadth and range of our engagements in this diverse and open-
ended area of practice and thought. The debates that emerge around
attempts to chart and define FPE are testament to the situatedness of
knowledge claims that are made when mapping such conversations. For
example, Elmhirst’s (2011) review began from Rocheleau et al.’s (1996)
landmark text that first coined the phrase Feminist Political Ecology,
and from this starting point, Elmhirst’s review centred on works that
brought feminist theorisations of subjectivity to bear on issues of dispos-
session, resource access and control. Taking a similar tack, but more
mindful of FPE’s relationship with global South feminisms, Resurrec-
ción (2017) considers FPE through the relationship between gender
and development studies and activist ecofeminisms, while Harcourt and
Nelson (2015) narrate FPE through queer ontologies and post-humanist
body politics. Other scholars have pressed further to challenge the hege-
monies of white, Anglophone knowledge practices to tell a story of FPE
through environmental justice and critical race theory (Mollett, 2017;
Mollett et al., 2020) and through decolonial and anticolonial ecolog-

ical feminist thinking and practice (Ojeda et al., 2022; Sultana, 2021;
Sundberg, 2017). Such reviews reflect the temporality of broader intel-
lectual currents and political demands, the often hemispheric spatialities
of authors’ rooted networks and journeys between activism, academia and
policy arenas. Stories about FPE reflect differently situated conversations
within FPE.
Thus, in this section which positions and honours the histories and
many conversations on which this book is built rather than presenting
a singular narrative of Feminist Political Ecology’s ‘origins’ and engage-
ments, we introduce a multiplicity of starting points and ongoing conver-
sations that have inspired the chapters in this book, and indeed, the
WEGO project. These plural starting points reflect and continue to influ-
ence an ever emergent but enduring set of practices, values and ethical
principles underpinning FPE, and provide a source for the concepts that
guide and are developed in the academic practice of FPE. Mindful of
the tyranny of exclusion and inclusion in any effort to ‘map’ FPE in the
knowledges we value in the practice of academic citation, we reference the
different texts here in order to point readers to the diverse conversations
in which we engaged with FPE and, as Max Liboiron writes to indicate
to readers ‘the relations we want to build…enacting good relations in a
text, through a text’ (Liboiron, 2021, p. 1).
For some of us, FPE emerged out of Political Ecology and critical
development studies, which focus on how power operates within socio-
ecological relations and research practice. Here, inspiration has come from
ecofeminism (Seager, 1993; Shiva, 1988), feminist science and technology
studies (Harding, 1991) and postcolonial feminist critiques of devel-
opment (Agarwal, 1998; Mohanty, 2003). FPE has engaged the Black
feminist concept of intersectionality (Cho et al., 2013) to move beyond
a singular and homogenising focus on women and/or gender binaries.
Instead, attention is drawn to multiple intersecting inequalities (e.g., race,
gender, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, age and geographical location)
and how these are reproduced and perpetuated within particular land-
scapes (Mollett, 2017; Rocheleau et al., 1996). This has deepened analysis
within ‘traditional’ political ecology concerns such as dispossession and
extractivism (Mollett, 2018), and conservation, access and exclusion
(Sundberg, 2004). Researchers within FPE have taken an intersectional
analysis to explore ecological relations, developing conceptualisations that
show how environmental subjectivities are forged through relations with

nature and everyday material practices (Nightingale, 2011).
These conversations have embraced a focus on overlooked spheres
of political ecological life, including lived experiences in the everyday
(Harris, 2015) and embodied practices (Sultana, 2011) as sites of
emotion, meaning and affect (Gururani, 2002; Singh, 2013). Space has
opened to understand environmental conflicts beyond cognitive valu-
ations of nature, where ‘emotional political ecology’ focuses attention
on ‘what one is allowed to remember, feel, enjoy or live’ (González-
Hidalgo & Zografos, 2020, p. 236; Velicu, 2015). Cross-cutting these
themes, this branch of FPE has found inspiration from feminist critiques
of science around who counts as a knowledge producer, what counts
as knowledge and how knowledge is produced (Sundberg, 2017). FPE
draws on Haraway’s (2001) concept of situated knowledge, which
unmasks the aura of scientific objectivity, and instead foregrounds the
embodied social relations from which knowledge emerges (Nightingale,
2003). This conversation has been central in building FPE research prac-
tice that aims to be ethical and accountable, and to avoid reproducing
power relations.
A third and related set of conversations in FPE emerges around
questions of sufficiency, degrowth and commoning as launch points
for reversing the damaging logics of unrelenting capitalist economic
growth and extractive nature-society relations, understood as a crisis of
social reproduction (Barca, 2020; Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2016). Inspi-
ration here is drawn from feminist activism and scholarship that seeks
instead to value all life-sustaining labour, thus foregrounding relations
and economies of care (Tronto, 2015) and replacing efficiency with suffi-
ciency (Wichterich, 2015). FPE draws on ecofeminist theoretical roots
(Mellor, 2006; Shiva, 1988) to advocate ethical relations with more-
than-human species and the natural world as part of a wider ethics of
care (Di Chiro, 2017). Deeper engagements with narratives of restora-
tive and transformative justice (Agostino, 2018) are explored, with the
aim of living and being ‘otherwise’: fostering reciprocity, community and
care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In engaging with these concerns, FPE
is enriched through its links with the community economies research led
by JK Gibson-Graham et al. (2020), recent organising around feminist
degrowth (Dengler & Seebacher, 2019) and with Indigenous and other
worldviews that question the Eurocentric paradigm of growth, instead
expressing ideas of living and flourishing within ecological principles

(Kothari et al., 2014; Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019).
Finally, an important set of conversations in FPE emerges through
engagement with decolonial thought, which addresses the epistemic
privilege, violence and authority held in Eurocentric ways of knowing,
being and doing (Fanon, 2001; Quijano, 2000). Decolonial conversa-
tions around feminism in FPE have explored how Western (Eurocentric)
attempts to categorise, control and manage nature also involve control
over racialised and gendered bodies (Lugones, 2010), expressed by
some decolonial feminists through the concept of cuerpo-tierra-territorio
(body–land–territory). In capturing the dynamics of racism, capitalism
and gender oppression that underpin the coloniality of dispossessions,
extractivism and embodied experience, similar connections are drawn
between body, land and territory through different registers in other
Indigenous places (Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019). In attending to the
coloniality of gender and the historicization of the Eurocentric hierar-
chization of (white) humans above more-than-human nature, decolonial
perspectives in FPE opens space for alternative and pluriversal possibili-
ties of ‘being in relation’. From communities that fight socio-ecological
harms through thinking and being ‘otherwise’, the prefigurative everyday
practices within anticolonial feminist ecological activisms model ethical
relationships with other species and the natural world (Candraningram,
2018) and inspire the practice of FPE.
In the next section we set out how each chapter is engaging in
these diverse, and overlapping, conversations, but before we turn to that
mapping out of the FPE threads weaving through the book, we need to
explain how the book emerged through the WEGO-ITN which many of
the authors belong.
WEGO-ITN: Collective Learning Process

In this section we take a moment to reflect on how WEGO-ITN’s collec-
tive learning process helped to map out new areas and methodological
approaches in FPE as set out in the book. WEGO-ITN ran from 2018 to
2022, funded by the EU. With 15 PhD projects at its core, it evolved into
a network of scholar-activists working on feminist political ecology from
institutions in Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands, the UK
in the EU and outside the EU in Australia, India, Indonesia, Italy, New
Zealand, Portugal, Uruguay and the USA. WEGO-ITN is positioned in
different disciplines (political ecology, feminist studies, human geography,

anthropology and critical development studies) and has explored a wide
range of topics (as reflected in the book) from extractivism, commoning,
care, communities, livelihoods, embodied subjectivities to degrowth resis-
tances to mainstream economic development. The network aimed to do
self-reflective and non-extractive feminist research, working with indi-
viduals, local communities and social movements, contributing to FPE
debates in and out of academic spaces.
In its approach, WEGO-ITN took up a grounded understanding of
FPE to look at how everyday practices of social difference, environ-
mental change and political economies across scales in ‘a process of
doing environmentalism, justice and feminism differently’ (Harcourt &
Nelson, 2015, p. 9). WEGO-ITN’s emphasis has been to undertake
research and other activities that discern social and ecological injustices
at the intersection of systems of oppression (patriarchy, race, class, colo-
niality, speciesism) and collectively build equitable social and ecological
transformation (Cho et al., 2013; Elmhirst, 2018). As the network has
recorded on its website, WEGO-ITN has explored the multiple forms
of knowledge that shape and co-construct environmental practices and
the politics of the everyday through intersectional forms of social differ-
ence such as gender, class, ethnicity, age, ability, sexuality, place and
nation. In its different projects, WEGO-ITN has raised questions on
how nature, culture and society co-constitute each other, learning from
critiques of science by feminist theories, queer theories and environmental
humanities, and decolonial critiques of whiteness and privilege.
In constructing the chapters as dialogues, the book is grounded in
the ongoing conversations that made up the collaborative WEGO-ITN
research process. The designing, writing and editing of the book was
built into the WEGO-ITN training with a series of cross-generational
conversations (mostly on-line) among supervisors, mentors and part-
ners, emerging from the 15 PhD projects undertaken by early career
researchers. It is important to note that running through the research
process are reflections on how COVID-19 changed the nature and focus
of WEGO-ITN’s research in creative and unexpected ways. Going on-line
meant opening up new questions about embodied and in-place conver-
gences and between personal and political space. This posed a challenge in
the implementation of feminist methodologies engaged with participatory
action research techniques, but it also allowed for creativity to transform
the way we employ digital spaces to reach voices far from the places the
research is situated. The last years of the pandemic raised diverse questions
around languages of care in feminist and environmental justice research,
and politics. The encounters with the virus and the isolation it engen-
dered reinforced conversations about how to include more-than-human
actors to think with non-western epistemologies, natures and voices.
Reflecting on the complex processes of running a network that was
designed for face-to-face connections mainly on-line, the chapters also
look at how FPE as a research process based on feminist ethics could
respond and adapt to disruptions. The book’s conversations move in and
out the ethics of doing feminist research aware of historical and contem-
porary positions of power, paying attention to the authors’ shifting posi-
tionalities, origins and choices of how to do research. The conversations
reflect how it is important to make visible the troubles of doing politically
engaged research while learning from the COVID-19 pandemic’s restric-
tions on mobility and face-to-face engagement, as well as the possibilities
of using the technical openings in digital space. The chapters illustrate
the different ways to produce feminist intersectional and intergenerational
knowledge paying attention to research as political and ethical practice on-
line—across geo-political and language differences, differential access to
Internet and technical barriers, etc. The book therefore features a range of
styles reflecting different possibilities: each of the authors had to write and
reflect from wherever they had landed during the collaborative process.
Such an open approach has helped to create new methodological, theo-
retical and epistemological ways of doing research across geographical
arenas, breaking down older barriers around needing to travel and be in-
place. As a result, most of the writing is collaborative and fluid, allowing
for reflective, emotional and creative responses to the thorny questions
being asked around power, resistance and pain, with some chapters using
art, photos, pictures as well as storytelling.
By showcasing the experiential and emotional nature of doing FPE
research, the book illustrates the continuous praxis of feminist knowl-
edge production and how it is built through relationships in specific sites,
including in digital space. By using the form of conversation and making
transparent the positioning of the authors, the book’s methodology is
itself a critique of normative scientific models that are based on the idea
of the rational and disembodied researcher. The choice of writing conver-
sations is also a way to keep enquiries open, as the chapters do not attempt
to resolve the questions, but to probe and highlight diverse perspectives,
contradictions, self-reflexivity, as well as the complexities of intergener-

ational and intersectional researcher–participant relations. Storytelling is
the vehicle we use to recognise the plurality of ways of producing knowl-
edge, such as orality, and distances us from modern hegemonic stories
and rational economic narratives that support the existence of a unique
and absolute truth. In this way, the book embraces feminist research as a
continuous learning and unlearning process.
The book acknowledges the productive tension around putting
together a collaborative feminist book positioned on the margins of
academe, yet also funded by the EU and hosted by a whole set of
academic practices, including consolidating careers and gaining a PhD.
The chapters navigate the uneasiness of the funding/research/praxis, with
the political aim to do societally relevant and meaningful non-extractive
research. Each chapter contains a back and forth between method and
theory, between the known and unknown, what counts as knowledge and
data and how to respect ‘otherwise’ logics and world views. While the
chapters on decoloniality address some of these concerns most directly,
each chapter reflects on what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge
we are able to share, concerns which deeply informed the WEGO-ITN
project.
Themes Emerging from the Book’s Conversations

As the title ‘Contours of Feminist Political Ecology’ suggests, the
book aims to sketch out a series of common debates in feminism and
political ecology, re-opening and troubling themes such as population
(Chapter 10), extractivism (Chapters 2 and 3) and more-than-human
relationalities (Chapter 6), while also touching on topics that are not often
unpacked or mobilised in political ecology, such as ageing (Chapter 5),
health and the body (Chapters 4 and 12) and the use of art in research
and activism (Chapters 3 and 11). The book also revisits central themes
in feminist debates, such as care (Chapters 7 and 8) and decoloniality
(Chapters 9 and 12) through a political ecology viewpoint. Finally, it
engages with plural imaginings and futures of socio-ecological transfor-
mations, informed by critical feminist thinking. Importantly, the chapters
in this book engage with these themes and topics in a dialogical and open-
ended way, shaping together contours of FPE that are intentionally and
explicitly porous and incomplete. The stories told in many of the chapters
often originate from different geographies and include distinct identities,
histories and place-based complexities. Going beyond a mere comparison

between such cases, each chapter presents these stories as opportuni-
ties to reflect together on the analytical and theoretical frameworks that
link them together and which emerge from our ongoing dialogue and
interactions as researchers in the WEGO network.
A common thread running through the chapters is the effort made
by the authors to situate ourselves in the writing process, as we write
stories about places we visited (and/or inhabit), people we interact(ed)
with, communities we learn with and systems of power and oppression
that touch upon us in very different yet very connected ways. This is
expressed not so much in dry declarations of our nationality, profes-
sion or skin colour, but more in terms of autobiographies of pain and
illness connected to place, gender and race (see Chapter 4), intimate and
embodied understandings of theory such as age (Chapter 5) and decolo-
niality (Chapters 9 and 12), honest sharing of frustrations and fears over
topics such as population growth and population control (Chapter 10),
and the placing of personal memories of place and more-than-human
connections under an analytical lens of subjectivity formation (Chapters 6
and 12). All chapters strive to remain aware of how the knowledge we
produce is necessarily tied to our own histories and positionalities.
A key theme and point of reflection in many of the chapters are the
interrogation of knowledge politics and how such politics are often tied
to colonial and patriarchal histories and legacies. Dismantling such ways
of thinking around ‘natural resources’ and broader ecologies, including
those of human bodies, as well as ways to confront the climate crisis,
or ways of living that provide meaning and well-being to communities,
is a question engaged with from different starting points and geogra-
phies. In Chapter 2, authors reflect on the COP26 process and the
dominant discourse perpetuating climate colonialism in these arenas,
underpinned by processes of capitalism, imperialism and development.
They counter-pose these dominant notions of climate denialism, green-
washing and scripts for unjust transitions, including Net Zero, with the
intimate and untold stories of oil palm and extractivism in Indonesia,
environmental change and climate impacts in pastoralist communities in
Kenya and resistance to onshore oil extraction in the UK. Through their
analysis, they show how extractivism and climate coloniality take form
and operate in the everyday, including in false solidarities, but also how
communities articulate alternatives that subvert such narratives in prac-
tice. Chapter 3 continues that interrogation, reflecting on the process,
experiences and learnings of co-curating a series of exhibitions and events

as part of a feminist ecological politics. The authors look at how such
experiences cultivated care, foregrounded community and wove connec-
tions between extractive contexts. They pay close attention to how the
emotional and the embodied enter scholar-activist exhibition spaces as
a way to resist extractivism and find solidarity. Chapter 4 engages with
the themes of porosity and embodiment to trouble knowledge produced
and reproduced around health and bodies in relation to local ecologies
and understandings of place through the narration of experiences around
endometriosis, malaria and hyperemesis gravidarum in Southern Europe
and the USA. Authors show the political ecological nature not only of the
occurrence of illness, but also of the discourse generated around it and
its causes and its risks. The authors point to the reproduction of intersec-
tional injustices as well as ways to resist them, involving the use of certain
technologies.
Pushing FPE thinking on injustices further, Chapter 9 unpacks and
challenges the Eurocentric context of meaning making with reflections on
the authors’ epistemic relationship with coloniality. They share with the
reader their place-based position as researchers from the ‘global’ South,
defining their research as an outcome of thinking through decoloniality.
They explore how FPE and decoloniality give diverse meanings to subjec-
tivity, the body and the other as they outline how decoloniality informs
FPE research. The dialogue with FPE and decoloniality is continued in
Chapter 12, which looks at how meanings flow between Western and
Andean cultural horizons in urban environments marked by coloniality.
The authors share elements from the Andean worldview from a decolonial
perspective, inviting readers to consider Andean ways of understanding
and feeling the relationship between the social and the natural as ways to
learn about how to cope with social and environmental crises otherwise.
Continuing the engagement with open, pluriversal approaches to
ecologies, Chapter 11 looks at ways to shape social and environmental
futures not from a top-down technical or policy perspective but through
a grounded engagement in the imagination and vision of market vendors
in Mexico City. The author addresses energy in the future, learning from
market women’s dreams and fears in order to arrive at otherwise ways to
address energy transitions, unpacking the implications these visions may
have for communities and environments. The chapter illustrates a femi-
nist methodology that uses storytelling to build knowledge, working with
communities’ own visions of their futures.
While the overall tenor of the book intends to be open, learn from
difference and think positively about possibilities for the future, it is
also evident that the contours of FPE have been shaped by contesta-
tion. Paying attention to what is uncomfortable and where emotions
are sparked informs FPE as a vibrant and dynamic set of discourses.
In Chapter 10 the authors candidly look at the difficult (and often
avoided) topic of population in FPE reflecting on the responses to Donna
Haraway’s (2016) call to ‘make kin not babies’. They speak of others (and
their own) strong, even explosive, reactions to Haraway. The informal
dialogue format allows the authors to map out, from both a personal and
scholarly level, the contours of feminist thinking about the fraught topic
of population growth and population control, using emotions as an entry
point into academic and political debate.
Another strong and emotive theme throughout the book is the impor-
tance of care and its different (and contested) meanings in FPE theory
and practice. Chapter 7 features an intergenerational discussion on mean-
ings of care looking at care in relation to ethics, intersectional justice,
feminism and environmental activism. It highlights how care in activism,
teaching and research is part of FPE approaches to knowledge and politics
from both a Global South and North perspective. The activist scholars
in Chapter 8 look at how care is central to the move towards radical
social, economic and environmental change in their reflections on FPE
contributions to degrowth as an academic and activist movement. The
authors converse on FPE perspectives on care with a feminist critique of
the structural racial, gender and wider social inequalities perpetuated by
growth-dependent economic systems. They consider, with examples from
their own experiences with communities in both the Global South and
North, how paying attention to care work and valuing care for humans
and more-than-human others is crucial to building just, sustainable and
convivial societies. A practical example of how care informs FPE practice
and research is illustrated in Chapter 3. This chapter foregrounds how
the authors cultivated care as they worked with communities to create
an exhibition, paying attention to how the emotional and the embodied
enter into scholar-activist encounters. Chapter 5 also shows how care is
part of FPE theorising and practice in an examination of ageing experi-
ences as relational processes that require an awareness of how the ethics
of care is embodied in everyday practices. In the authors’ practice and
research on ageing in two very different contexts, they analyse how ageing
is part of dynamic socionatural relations, arguing that FPE needs a more
careful awareness of ageing experiences.
Another important theme that flows through the book is relations with
the more-than-human.
Chapter 6 explores the politics of interdependencies through situated
entanglements with water. The authors set out how more-than-human
interdependencies within FPE means starting from an understanding
of relationality. Drawing on research with waters and communities in
Maharashtra, India and the Tagus River in Spain, the chapter exam-
ines the co-constitution of embodied subjectivities with the more-than-
human, addressing issues of well-being, illness and ecological change
in contemporary waterscapes. The chapter’s discussions on the contra-
dictions, tensions and ethical implications of situated more-than-human
co-becomings is echoed in the dialogical debate around Andean ways of
understanding territory in Chapter 12 and the tensions with a modern
understanding of urban landscapes, which see nature as something to be
exploited and extracted, erasing other culture’s meanings and understand-
ings of living with the more-than-human.
These are some of, but by no means all, the main themes that inform
how FPE emerges in the book. By highlighting multiple perspectives,
contradictions, self-reflexivity, as well as the complexities of intergener-
ational and intersectional researcher-participant relations, the book shows
how feminist research is a continuous learning and unlearning process.
This includes navigating tensions between funding, research and praxis,
method and theory, the known and unknown and sensing and feeling
(sentipensar). Throughout the book the authors grapple with the tensions
of doing research that meets the requirements of research institutions (the
university space, the EU), while respecting different logics and world
outlooks. There is a sense of excitement in doing FPE research which,
as the different chapters show in creative and unexpected ways, opens
questions and makes convergences in fields not previously considered.
We hope that the multi-layered debate in the chapters around the diverse
meanings, understandings and languages of FPE invites readers to think
further about how to continue to shape the contours of FPE.
Where to Go from Here?

The book has set out how WEGO-ITN1 has evolved through meaningful
and careful research as the world faces ongoing climate crisis, the prospect
of future pandemics, wars, economic and political uncertainty and rever-
sals on gains made, including in the areas of gender equality, intersectional
justice and human rights. We hope the book contributes to an under-
standing of how FPE can support our individual and collective resilience
in the future.
The book illustrates the importance of innovation and adaptation to
becoming experimental, creative and flexible in order to deal with indi-
vidual, institutional and global uncertainties. It sets out how we are
learning to cope in this new normal: pandemics, economic and social
uncertainty and climate crisis. The quest is how to build relationships both
virtually and in-place; politically and culturally that can shape FPE as a
space for creative learning. We hope to ‘live the talk’ of a feminist network
of transformation that centres relations of care as we look for alternatives
to capitalism and mainstream development through engagement with
communities.
This relational approach is a key dimension of FPE. While the hege-
monic patriarchal mode of development is based on domination, conflict
and exploitation (over bodies, cultures, nature), FPE promotes a transi-
tion based on the day-to-day practices of women, men, others and their
communities to sustain ecologically viable livelihoods. The shaping of
these livelihoods takes place within the tension between autonomous and
diverse imaginaries and the impositions of capitalist globalisation. Imag-
ining the lives and the worlds individuals and communities want to live
in needs to happen outside the development discourse that has already
imagined and determined the world for all of us. We hope the reader
1 WEGO-ITN has transitioned into the FEST* network (Feminist Ecological Soli-
darities for Transformation) network. The direction for the FEST* network will be to
continue FPE conversations expanding to different spaces undertaking activist research
with people engaged in intersectional intergenerational environment justice in communi-
ties/institutional arenas and bring their stories and strategies together in a series of FPE
dialogues, workshops and other creative encounters. WEGO-ITN held five FPE national
dialogues between July 2021 and May 2022 in Spain in dialogue with Latin America,
The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the UK. These FPE dialogues were set up in order
to contribute not only to academic debates but also to societal and institutional change
highlighting the importance of community campaigns around gender and labour rights,
food sovereignty, well-being, body politics, ageing and rights to health and clean water.
agrees that the book opens future possibilities on the basis of our collec-
tive research and encounters; our experimental and culturally anchored
practices aimed at putting Life at the centre.
Funding: This chapter was funded by the Wellbeing Ecology Gender and
cOmmunities Innovation Training Network (WEGO-ITN) funded by the Euro-
pean Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the
Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764908-WEGO 2018-2021.
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CHAPTER 2
Untold Climate Stories: Feminist Political

Ecology Perspectives on Extractivism,
Climate Colonialism and Community
Alternatives
Dian Ekowati, Siti Maimunah, Alice Owen,

Eunice Wangari Muneri, and Rebecca Elmhirst
Prelude
Notes from COP26 Climate Conference:
Confronting Climate Coloniality
We begin this chapter with our reflections from the United Nations
COP26 climate conference (26th meeting of the Conference of Parties
on climate) in late November 2021, following our participation in various
D. Ekowati · A. Owen · R. Elmhirst (B)

University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
e-mail: r.j.elmhirst@brighton.ac.uk
A. Owen
e-mail: A.Owen@brighton.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_2
20 D. EKOWATI ET AL.
events in and outside the summit. The summit itself was a space domi-
nated by corporations, fossil fuel companies and powerful governments
and included a zone for NGOs, civil society groups and green capitalism
entrepreneurs promoting carbon reductionism (Net Zero), the financial-
isation of nature and a raft of techno-utopian innovations. Politicians
and corporate leaders brought activist slogans into their speeches, while
youth and civil society voices were celebrated and ‘staged’ within the
mainstream conference (Aykut et al., 2022). Outside COP26 itself, a
‘fringe’ of loosely connected activist spaces were sites of counter-narrative
and the expression of decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist
politics. The Peoples’ Summit involved social and environmental justice
activists, youth, Indigenous groups, critical academics and trade unions
whose diverse registers and claims converged around a sense of grassroots
globality in opposition to the re-enchanting of green capitalism that was
going on inside the COP (Aykut et al., 2022).
From our vantage point as feminist political ecology (FPE) researcher-
activists experiencing the dissonances, exclusions and erasures as we
navigated these COP26 spaces, we witnessed the contrast between the
climate narratives of the corporate fixers and the stories from those
who embody the impact of extractivism and corporate greed: mining,
toxic waste, oil drilling and ecological degradation. Our COP26 reflec-
tions inspire the questions that frame our dialogue in this chapter: how
does climate colonialism surface in the reflections we share from our
research and activism? How is it that the root causes of climate change—
extractivism, injustice and disconnection from nature—are simultaneously
rendered invisible and reinforced in corporate and state responses? Are
colonial and extractive injustices being reproduced in green initiatives as
nuanced community perspectives remain unheard? What alternatives to
extractivism might be heard in these stories?
Mai: I am reminded of Indonesian President Jokowi’s speech delivered
at the World Leader’s Summit at the beginning of COP26 in Glasgow,
UK. He put “climate change as a major threat to global prosperity and
S. Maimunah
University of Passau, Passau, Germany
E. Wangari Muneri
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2 UNTOLD CLIMATE STORIES: FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY … 21
development”, and then went on to answer that threat by offering, among

other things, the development of an ‘electric car ecosystem’, and the
development of a green economy-style Special Economic Zone (SEZ). All
this means that Indonesia admits to the existence of climate change but
continues extractive development with the same pattern. The expansion of
the electric car industry means the enlargement of forest and land clearing
for extracting nickel in islands of Sulawesi and Maluku, and coal extraction
in Kalimantan to produce the materials and dirty energy for the manufac-
ture of electric car batteries. The expansion of the biofuel economy means
the expansion of large-scale palm oil plantations in remote parts of the
country, especially in Papua. The proposed measures also include a green
SEZ that involves constructing a large-scale dam along the Kayan river to
power a smelter plant in Kalimantan. Isn’t his speech a form of climate
denial?
Eunice: My experience of COP 26 was different from any other I had
previously attended. Not only because I attended virtually, but the atten-
dance by lobbying “polluters” like giant fossil fuel companies and social
justice activists had increased significantly compared to previous years,
warranting mention by various media outlets. The overwhelming pres-
ence of the trending #NetZero on LinkedIn and the notable attendance
of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry confirmed COP as a pledging
event, which codifies greenwashing. I got the sense that the Peoples’
Summit had become larger and more organized, which is a ray of hope
that the greenwashing happening on the inside is being countered. Like
previous COPs, there was lack of nuance; an example is the classification
of livestock being bad for the environment and climate. The issue was
picked up by other scholars who brought sheep to the COP with the
aim of illustrating that the issue is not livestock per se, but their intensi-
fied production. This message resonated with the Maasai community that
I work with in Kenya, and how they are disproportionately affected by
extreme weather patterns but now risk facing social penalties by being
lumped in with intensive livestock farmers elsewhere in the world who
are the targets of climate activism.
Dian: I presented at the COP Coalition Peoples’ Summit alongside the
other authors here. I presented the stories of different people in Kali-
mantan, Indonesia, whose life has been changed by oil palm in different
ways, depending on their class, ethnicity, migration status, ability, age and
gender. There are terrible stories and there are some hopes. There are
differences in ways oil palm is produced, and differences in ways it affects
peoples’ life around it. I remembered that one of the participants in our
COP Coalition event from the Global North expressed their shock as they
think of oil palm production and its impacts in a homogeneously violent
way, and another participant expressed concern about greenwashing in
oil palm large-scale sustainability programmes, both coming from the
belief that boycotting palm oil will do good for all. At the same time,
I remember the anxieties of some small-scale oil palm farmers I met as
boycotting destroys their hope and reduces the price for their oil palm
harvest. The green discourse in the Global North towards oil palm, that
often overlaps with the movement to support Indigenous people, brings
different impacts to those rural people who do not necessarily fall into
the ‘Indigenous’ category and who interact with oil palm trees in their
everyday life. And this impact is not always a good thing.
Alice: Throughout the COP, the side events and the People’s Climate
Summit different people and organisations created and held diverse spaces
for storytelling, sharing and listening. Through these stories and spaces,
diverging ways of knowing, ways of doing things and ideas about climate
action were articulated and imagined. Striking juxtapositions arose. Many
concerned with climate justice are urging deep unlearning from our histo-
ries, learning the histories of colonisation and discovering languages,
practices, stories which have been marginalised and which might be
revived. At an activist event, an Aboriginal speaker (from colonised
Australia) described how, in their culture, they are “walking backwards”
into the future, looking back towards their ancestors with 60,000 years of
land stewardship and harmony rather than speculating about the future.
Conversely, at an unofficial side event the next day with ‘storytelling’
in the description, a group of mostly Australian financiers and bankers
shared their ‘visions’ for the future; their pragmatic imaginations conjured
scenes of what Net Zero 2050 would look like in ways that I’m sure
they thought were utopian (international investment innovations, green
industry) but to me seemed to be taking us closer towards dystopia. “If
we believe it, it will come true” they said with conviction, and it scared
me to think they might be right as their speculations begin to materialise
from these sectors so detached from what it means to be good stewards
of the land.
Inspired by our reflections on COP26 we weave a dialogue through
stories and reflections from our research and/or activism in Indonesia,
Kenya and the United Kingdom. We explore what is learned when our
reflections on grand narratives and systemic injustices are woven together
in the warp and weft of feminist political ecology, with its emphasis
on situated knowledges, lived experience and the everyday. Our various
threads converge and diverge around the issues that decentre root causes,
erase nuance and extend injustices in climate responses.
Introduction
The story of climate breakdown responses is one of dissonance between
mainstream discourses that highlight capitalist market- and techno fixes
and those of climate justice activists whose counter narratives call these
out as ‘false solutions’ that perpetuate injustices and fail to address
root causes. In this chapter, we respond to what Farhana Sultana has
described as the ‘unbearable heaviness of climate colonialism’: an ongoing
coloniality underpinned by processes of capitalism, imperialism and devel-
opment that were inherent in the staging of COP26 (Sultana, 2022, p. 3).
We do this by bringing together our reflections—what we have previ-
ously labelled as ‘untold stories’—from our research and activism with
communities in Indonesia, Kenya and the United Kingdom.1
Dian Ekowati reflects from her research on the everyday care that
enables life to be sustained in the oil palm landscape, a landscape that
is often described as an extractivist agricultural system, but that at the
same time is framed as a green alternative to the carbon economy. Siti
Maimunah is an activist and researcher working alongside communities
in Kalimantan, but more broadly is seeking to understand the operation
of resource extractivism in Indonesia, working with NGOs to support
communities affected by extractivism projects. Alice Owen brings her
insights from her research on the politics of knowledge as a campaign
against a new onshore oil extraction site (Horse Hill) has unfolded in
the South of England. Although the local impacts of the site can seem
unspectacular compared to extractivism elsewhere (including by British
companies in areas colonised by Britain), critical attention is drawn to
the climate impacts of the project through campaigning and protest.
This exposes the ways in which extractivist logics and implicit climate
denial permeate the local experience and the global climate crisis. Eunice
1 We refer here to our presentation at the People’s Summit for Climate Justice in
Glasgow, UK from 6 to 10th November 2021. Talks from the event have been lodged
here: https://cop26coalition.org/talk/.
Wangari reflects from her research on the gendered nature of environ-

mental changes in the Maasai pastoralist community in Kenya as the
community adapts to erratic weather events like prolonged droughts and
recurrent floods, and where relations between people and cattle create
differentiated experiences to environmental changes. Rebecca Elmhirst
contributes through her immersion in these stories and the questions they
inspire and address, alongside the reflections she brings from longstanding
research with communities in Indonesia’s oil palm landscapes. Three of us
write from positionalities embedded in the Global South, and two of us
in the Global North.
We build our dialogue around the systemic roots of the climate crisis
and unjust responses, understood through the concept of extractivism
(Willow, 2018). Extractivism refers to an increasingly prominent modality
of capitalist accumulation based on destructive processes of subjugation,
depletion and exploitation of nature and life. It includes the exploita-
tive extraction of a broad range of natural and human resources from
colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas (Veltmeyer &
Petras, 2014) and as such, is deeply entwined with the dynamics of colo-
niality, imperialistic forms of corporate power and deepening inequalities
(Pereira & Tsikata, 2021). Its logic is one of endless growth, corporate
enclosure of land and water, erosion of biodiversity and the exploitation
of life, rooted in and enabled by coloniality (Gómez-Barris, 2017).
Our dialogues draw on a loosely convened feminist political ecology
(FPE)—a nexus of environmental feminisms based around an under-
standing of and response to global systems and their material conse-
quences (Sundberg, 2016). Bringing feminist political ecology perspec-
tives to bear on extractivism means we connect an analysis of global
systems with lived experience, the everyday, the emotional and personal,
and do these by attending to intersecting forms of power, including patri-
archy, racism and coloniality, worked through at multiple scales. Our
research reflections do not share a common conceptual framework, but
our connections in the convening space of FPE means we share an under-
standing of extractivism as configured differently in places with particular
histories, relationships and responses to the logics of racial capitalism
(Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gómez-Barris, 2017; Pereira & Tsikata, 2021),
and this is reflected in the stories we explore in the chapter.
We have previously described these stories as ‘untold’ in the sense
that the coloniality of climate knowledges and discourses marginalises and
eclipses those stories that do not easily fit into mainstream climate policy
narratives (Chao & Enari, 2021). Moreover, where stories are incom-
mensurate and incompatible with the kinds of stories that ignite globality
and connection in climate activism, they may remain unheard, risking
new and perhaps hidden forms of injustice for the most marginalised
in marginalised communities. FPE requires an ethics of care in how we
theorise, research, discuss and write, attuned to the diverse, situated and
nuanced ways in which each of us knows, recognises and embodies inter-
secting forms of power. Our reflections are partial, dependent on our
positionalities and our geographical, ontological and political situatedness.
Rather than bringing ventriloquised narratives ‘from’ communities, we
build dialogues around our reflections, shaped through the myriad rela-
tionships of academia, activism, friendship and family, in which each of us
is enmeshed. Donna Haraway (2019) states that it matters what stories
tell stories, it matters whose stories tell stories. We consider what we learn
when we bring our reflections from our research and activism contexts
together and suggest that in relating/re-telling together, the adjacency
of differently situated stories posed through some common themes helps
gain perspective on the contours of extractivism and climate coloniality in
the everyday and helps us to confront the challenges of bringing nuance
and avoiding erroneous solidarity when these stories are brought into
climate justice activism spaces. We begin by outlining what we mean
when we describe extractivism as a root cause of climate coloniality in
the contexts of our research, before opening our dialogue around ques-
tions that emerge when we bring our stories together. We close with some
reflections on community alternatives, where these foster or recover more
reciprocal ways of living outside an extractivist logic.
Climate Coloniality: Extractivism as Root Cause

In early 2022, several months after COP26, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change’s working group 2 published its report on the impacts
of climate change on people. Significantly, and for the first time, the
report named colonialism as a driver of the climate crisis and as an
ongoing issue that is exacerbating community climate vulnerability (IPPC,
2022). This attention to root causes associated with an ongoing colo-
niality in climate impacts and responses has long been a connecting thread
linking campaigns for climate justice, including those of Indigenous and
land-based peoples’ movements in the Global South, race and environ-
mental justice activists and those rooted in global justice/anti-poverty
campaigns. Climate justice aligns with the environmentalism of the poor

and dispossessed in their struggles for land and livelihood and against an
underlying economic system that provides profit for a few but depletion
and harm for many (Tokar, 2020).
When we describe extractivism as a root cause of climate harm,
we are referring to what Chagnon et al. (2022, p. 3) describe as ‘a
complex of self-reinforcing practices, mentalities, and power differen-
tials underwriting and rationalising socio-ecologically destructive modes
of organising life through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity’.
While there has been some debate that the concept should be restricted
to its origins in the white settler context of Latin American political
economy, core–periphery inequalities and mineral extraction at scale,
we follow a more expansive reading of extractivism located in femi-
nist political ecology. We see the logic of extractivism as involving the
appropriation of human and more-than-human life forms, depleting and
draining in a potentially irreversible way. Extractivist logics involve a
centralisation of power and the deepening of relational and intersecting
inequalities (colonial, racial, patriarchal, interspecies): extractivism is a
modality of ‘development’ that conditions and pressures all life forms
(Chagnon et al., 2022). A range of experiences across different geograph-
ical settings exists within these abstract characterisations of extractivism,
reflecting different histories of coloniality and settlement, contemporary
geopolitics and the ‘nature’ of what is being extracted.
On the Indonesian island of Kalimantan, the ecological injustices
produced through extractivism are clear, taking shape through the coun-
try’s mercantilist colonial history and its legacies, and through more
regionalised forms of political dominance and oppression between domi-
nant and marginalised ethnicities (Chua & Idrus, 2022). Since the
colonial period, East Kalimantan has been an area for land, forest, mineral
and oil exploitation, with rivers turned into the transportation infrastruc-
ture for the extraction of raw materials to supply markets in the Global
North. Coloniality is expressed in the state’s granting of land concessions
to international mining companies: like the colonial strategy of divide et
impera, these mining companies divide farmers and ecosystems to get
‘cheap nature’ (Moore, 2015). Siti Maimunah (Mai) describes the deple-
tion and draining of life as extractivist mining, and its irreversible impacts
make other ways of relating to land impossible:
Mai: I received a series of news reports via WhatsApp from a friend
from East Kalimantan when I had just arrived in Scotland to attend COP
26 in Glasgow. Febi Abdi, 25 years old, was a resident of Makroman

village, Samarinda, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. His body was found at an
abandoned coal pit owned by PT Arjuna. Febi is at least the 40th person
to die in an abandoned mine pit in the last decade; most victims were chil-
dren. Nearly 60% of Indonesia’s 3,033 abandoned mining pits are in East
Kalimantan and most are coal pits (Shahbanu et al., 2018). In Makroman
village, mining companies managed to coerce the local farmers in the hilly
areas into selling their land for mining extraction, with the promise of
employment with the company. In the growing seasons that followed, rice
fields (sawah) on the lower slopes began to fail due to erosion, flooding,
and water shortages. Surviving sawah owners must struggle with the rise
in production costs due to reduced soil fertility, water shortages, and weed
and pest attacks, eventually selling their formerly productive fields to the
mining companies with a loss of livelihood.
In Murung Raya, Central Kalimantan, the operation of an extractive
mega project affected the identity of the Murung people and changed
their relationship with nature. The river was the primary source of clean
water, while river fish and game meat from the forest was the primary
protein source. Today, the river water is no longer drinkable, and the
Murung have to collect water from creeks far from the village or buy it.
Coal extraction in Kalimantan is a history of capital accumulation and
destruction of the earth that has contributed to the pollution of the
atmosphere. As this damage is ignored, extractivism contributes to the
accumulation of climate disasters globally.
Elsewhere in Kalimantan, the logic of extractivism takes shape through
the granting of oil palm concessions to large-scale companies. Corpo-
rate investments in oil palm in Indonesia exhibit the key features
of agrarian extractivism: vast, capital-intensive monocultures reliant on
external inputs and technologies, driven by profit-maximisation rather
than social and ecological well-being, creating a form of corporate occu-
pation (Li & Semedi, 2021). The term ‘plantationocene’ has been used to
describe the agro-extractivist mode of production, processing and labour,
with attention drawn to the colonial legacies of this way of controlling
bodies and nature to enable the extraction of profits (Wolford, 2021).
In common with the extractivist logics of mining in Kalimantan, Dian
Ekowati describes the impacts of this mode of oil palm production on the
communities whose stories she shares in her research:
Dian: The power behind large-scale oil palm grows the trees in such a
violent way that depletes lives (human and more than human). Oil palm
cultivated on a large-scale covers hundreds of thousands to millions of

hectares of land, planted solely in oil palm trees. Monoculture is the only
known way for planting oil palm by the oil palm companies. I remember
how we often got lost when passing through a company’s oil palm blocks
(concessions) due to the similarities of surroundings: same trees, pattern
of planting and similar dirt roads. Relegating/subjugating other forms of
life is the feature of a large-scale oil palm plantation.
The complex entanglements of coloniality and extractivist logics
in Kenya reflect colonial legacies that have transformed relationships
between people, land and animals. The historical marginalisation of
pastoralist communities in Kenya by land dispossession can be traced
to the colonial era but continued through the post-colonial adminis-
tration excising large portions of rangelands and demarcating them for
wildlife conservation, separate from humans. In addition to demarcating
wildlife conservation parks, further Maasai land was allocated to white
settlers and crop growing communities, whom the government perceived
as engaging in more profit-oriented forms of production. As Eunice
explains, pastoralism was and is still seen as an archaic, primitive and
unproductive form of land-use in dire need of modernisation.
Eunice: It is no wonder that pastoralism’s negative portrayals domi-
nate pastoral policies. One popular perception was that overstocking and
overgrazing of cattle was causing desertification in the fragile drylands.
This mistaken view has been refuted in research, but government pastoral
policies advocated for sedentarization and restriction of mobility for
pastoralists and their livestock with the aim of modernising them to mirror
the European livestock farmers in temperate climates.
These more extractive forms of livestock production based on seden-
tarisation have compromised mobility, a key strategy used by the
pastoralists to cope and adapt to climate variability and other changes.
Mobility allows for use of spatially heterogeneous and climatically variable
resources. Reduction in mobility increases the risks of degradation as only
part of the rangeland is heavily utilised, making pastoralists susceptible to
droughts.
Eunice: During my field work, elderly respondents recall the earlier
days when Maasai grazing land went as far as Nairobi (approximately
250 kms away) and all the way to Laikipia, in Northern Kenya, where
the current Northern Maasai are located. They reminisce how access to
the rangelands made life easier for the community during events like
droughts, floods, pest invasions and diseases. The effects of these land
grabs have severely compromised the community’s ability to respond to

climate shocks and stressors that frequent the region.
Socio-political and colonial processes of agrarian extractivism and
neoliberal conservation are transforming landscapes and the ways pastoral
communities relate to them, reducing mobility and preventing them
from using their traditional knowledge and practices, undermining their
livelihoods and life-making.
Our reflections on the specific histories and experiences of extractivism
draw out the ways these have been shaped by colonial pasts in the Global
South. In what sense is coloniality associated with the extractivist project
that Alice is researching in a Global North context and how does this
relate to extractivisms elsewhere?
Alice: In school history lessons I learnt about Tudor royalty, the Indus-
trial Revolution and the success of the British Empire, the abolition of
slavery. Large, dark chapters of England’s history of plunder, violence,
dispossession and (cultural) genocide were either neglected or reframed
to tell a particular story of the nation’s pivotal contribution to global
‘progress’ and the making of the modern world. Decolonial scholarship
and critical histories retell the story of modernity, giving due importance
to the colonial encounters by the British and other colonising countries
which led to violent erasures and subordinations of peoples, cultures and
territories.
An essential tool to colonial expansion and the extraction of wealth
were the logics of extractivism, justified through scientific reasoning and
Christian morality which compelled the conquering and taming of unruly
‘Others’. A key trick underlying the ‘Death of Nature’ (Merchant, 1980)
and in justifying colonial extractivism was (and is) to render the Other
as ontologically available for extraction, describing certain peoples as
inhuman and other-than-human nature as inanimate. This move trans-
forms the Other into a potential resource, and under the imperative of
nation building comes the ‘need’ to dominate, exploit and accumulate
the wealth of these ‘resources’. Scientific innovations made (and make)
accelerating resource extractivism seem inevitable; the technical ability to
map resources pre-empts their extraction, the innovation of technolo-
gies aspires to bring them into being. Since 1835 the British Geological
Survey has mapped resources in the UK’s interests both nationally and
overseas. In 2014, the Weald Basin in Southeast England was surveyed
by the BGS to estimate the potential shale oil and shale gas resources,
indicating between 2.20 and 8.57 billion barrels of shale oil could be in
the region. Somewhat inevitably such findings attracted prospective indus-

tries, including to the Horse Hill site where both unconventional (shale,
requiring additional stimulation such as by hydraulic or acid fracturing)
and conventional oil plays have been explored.
The UK and the Industrial Revolution were at the heart of the rise and
spread of fossil fuels, setting in motion the climate crisis. The centrality
of fossil fuels to industry and society was not inevitable but a choice to
maximise the reliability, mobility, productivity and thus profits of industry
compared to the use of traditional energy sources such as water mills
(Malm, 2016). The rise of urban industry in the eighteenth century was
accompanied by the enclosures of the commons, meaning people who
had once lived closely with the land with certain rights and responsibili-
ties were forced to find labour in cities. Although much less violent than
in colonial contexts, this dispossession and disconnection from the land
underpinned by the logics of extractivism also marks a loss of ways of
life more in tune with nature. With much industry outsourced from the
UK over the last century to countries with less stringent human rights
and environmental regulations, it is possible for many in the UK to live
without considering either the social and environmental costs of high-
consumption lifestyles or the forgotten ways of thinking about nature
as something humans are a part of rather than apart from. Perhaps it
is through unusual confrontations with extractivism, such as the arrival
of potential onshore oil and gas in the English countryside—or indeed
experiences of the droughts and heatwaves exacerbated by the climate
crisis—that the underlying assumptions of modernity can be brought into
question.
In the stories we share, extractivism reflects a political ontology based
on imaginaries of human exceptionality, nature–culture dualisms and
mechanistic or technocentric ways of understanding or relating to the
world. Extractivism extends beyond (ab)using the earth as it is also a way
of acting and being in the world; it constitutes a specific way of thinking,
knowing and acting—of relating to nature (Willow, 2018), which is
normalised in Global North contexts, as Alice describes. Reductive polit-
ical ontologies underpin green economy initiatives based on achieving
Net Zero carbon emissions as a ‘solution’ to climate change. When green
economy initiatives emerge within an extractivist logic, this perpetuates a
human mastery of ‘nature’ through greenwashing technofixes (e.g., off-
setting carbon emissions through neoliberal conservation, as described
by Eunice) and novel extractions (e.g., palm oil production as biofuel,
as described by Dian or rare earth mineral mining, as promoted by

Indonesia’s president, as Mai has explained). These forms build from and
entrench climate coloniality (Sultana, 2022), reinforcing the interplay of
colonialism, extractivism and climate injustice. So far, we have considered
the ways in which the depleting and draining properties of extractivism
unfold in our research contexts. As we thread our way back to the ques-
tions inspired in our COP26 reflections, we turn now to explore the
themes that emerge when we bring our specific and situated reflections
together.
Climate Vocabularies: Expanding

the Extractive Frontier
Climate change narratives and accompanying vocabularies are variously
mobilised by campaign groups to support claims against extractive
projects, sometimes at odds with the concerns and experiences of those
experiencing the everyday coloniality of extractivism. Conversely and
simultaneously, the state and extractive industries use vocabularies of
climate change to legitimise an expanding and deepening of extractivism
under the guise of green industry. Our dialogue in this section considers
the geographical and discursive dissonance of climate change vocabularies
as they are introduced and mobilised in fossil fuel extraction contexts in
Indonesia and the United Kingdom.
Climate ‘impacts’ describe the risks and already unfolding realities of
social and ecological breakdowns that result from anthropogenic climate
change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The climate crisis is a plane-
tary phenomenon, but as climate justice campaigns insist, responsibility
for and vulnerability to climate change play out along the contours
of coloniality and inequality. Climate impact narratives—including in
localised and critical analyses of climate impacts—tend not to define the
social and ecological impacts of extractivism (the root cause of climate
change) as ‘climate impacts’. This creates a disconnect between the
devastation and violence caused by the extraction of fossil fuels (and
other socio-ecologically destructive processes) and that which is caused
by the combustion of fossil fuels. In this sense, we suggest that climate
change narratives which describe climate change as happening every-
where or elsewhere can overlook—sometimes strategically, sometimes
ignorantly—local everyday experiences of extractivism.
How Is the Vocabulary of Climate Change Dislocated

from the Everyday Experiences of Extractivism?
We consider this question from the contrasting fossil fuel extraction
contexts of Kalimantan in Indonesia and the Surrey Hills in the United
Kingdom.
Mai: In Sungai Murung village, Central Kalimantan, or Makroman
village in East Kalimantan, the coal extraction areas on the island of
Kalimantan, farmers and women do not use the vocabulary of “cli-
mate change” in everyday activities. When I met Tukiyem, a woman
vegetable picker, she told me about Genjer leaves (Limnocharis flava—
Yellow velvet) which is increasingly difficult to obtain because of coal
mining. In Central Kalimantan, while bathing on the Lanting (a floating
hut in the river where people bathe and wash clothes while telling stories),
I didn’t hear anyone talk about climate change. Yet the Lanting reveals
the changing nature of flooding. Swidden agriculture (rotational farming)
depends on rainwater, but now the rainy season is uncertain. Instead, the
women told me a story about women’s protests and coal road blockades
in 2015 because the river water was polluted by coal mine waste, causing
river water to become undrinkable. Coal mines impact rice fields, gardens,
and water sources in Makroman village. Meanwhile, Sungai Murung
village has been surrounded by logging companies since the 1970s and
coal extraction since 2000. Clearing of land, destruction of forests and
gardens, use of transportation, and burning of coal are the causes of
climate change, destroying nature and ruining human bodies. This means
that irregular flooding, river pollution, undrinkable water, failed harvests,
deaths of children in abandoned coal mines are because of coal extraction:
they are a climate vocabulary.
Why does the vocabulary of people who live around extractive zone
disappear from the negotiating table at COP 26 or at previous COP
meetings? The answer is because mainstream, Western-biased knowl-
edge divides society and nature. Climatology separates climate change
indicators, such as carbon dioxide, as external to the community and
more-than-human nature (Lohman, 2019). Effectively, climate change
is separated from its cause, extractivism. The mainstream is keeping the
climate change narrative away from everyday life because the climate
crisis is considered a threat to capital accumulation that depends on
extractivism. The mainstream solutions directed by the state, corpora-
tions, elites, and international NGOs are framed in technical, scientific
language, and implemented on a massive scale: they expand the operation

of extractivism.
The community in Samarinda shows how coal extraction in their terri-
tory, and its impact on families and communities, is an inseparable part of
‘climate change’. Farmers’ representatives in Makroman and residents of
the city of Samarinda began discussing the relationship between village
and city, rural and urban, coal mining, and climate change in 2012.
They established a citizen movement called “Samarinda Menggugat”.
They used their climate vocabulary to sue the Indonesian government for
failing to protect Samarinda citizens from coal extraction and its contri-
bution to climate change. In 2013, the representatives of “Samarinda
Menggugat” brought a lawsuit to the Samarinda District Court; it became
the first citizen lawsuit in Indonesia (Toumbourou, 2014). One of their
demands was to urge the Indonesian president and the East Kalimantan
governor to close hundreds of abandoned coal mines in Samarinda. Their
case was twice won in the city and provincial high courts in 2014 after 27
court trials but lost in the Supreme Court in 2016.
Samarinda Menggugat was connecting coal and climate—teaching us
about climate vocabulary. Mai’s account shows the ways in which climate
change vocabularies emerge (when introduced by the state, corporations
and NGOs from outside the community) and were submerged when the
community centred its case around environmental justice.
Alice: I am so often hesitant to bring my experiences and observations
of the onshore oil industry from the South of England into conversation
with the testimonies Mai shares of the loss of lives, livelihoods and ways
of life associated with open cast coal mining in Indonesia. I acknowledge
the experiences of extractivism in England are incomparable to colonial
contexts, yet there are commonalities in the way extractive logics and
power are imposed. The violences experienced in colonial contexts have
provoked insightful multi-dimensional analyses of extractivism; learning
from (and taking care not to appropriate or extract) these perspectives
and critical analyses can inform an understanding of extractive logics and
power relations here in the centre of empire and fossil-fuelled industrial
expansion.
Here—at the small (approximately two hectares) Horse Hill oil
production site, set back from an oak-lined road between suburbia,
Gatwick airport and privately-owned countryside—the experiences of
extractivism are unspectacular. Perhaps the most pronounced way extrac-
tivism is evident is in the continued support given to the industry by the
council, regulators, police and central government which overlooks and

implicitly denies evidence of environmental and climate risks. Many of
these risks are invisible, from the chemical fumes that sometimes surround
the site, to the changing pressures and chemistry deep underground
that pose a potential risk of seismicity and groundwater pollution, to
the greenhouse gas emissions when the oil is combusted and the asso-
ciated impacts of anthropogenic climate change. For the campaigners
objecting to Horse Hill, the challenge is not only that these risks, which
do not dramatically or directly affect local communities, can be difficult
to mobilise around, but moreover that the systems of national planning
policy and local governance are not designed in a way which accounts for
the potential social and ecological costs of the proposed project.
Climate change does however present an opportunity through which
the planning committee’s decision can be challenged. As with the
“Samarinda Menggugat” case and the plethora of climate litigation cases
pursued by citizens and NGOs over the last decade, the law is being sharp-
ened as a tool with which to fight polluting projects and, in turn, draw
attention to the local impacts and injustices of extractivism. Following the
local authority’s decision to retain and extend the oil production site in
2019, local campaigners with the support of environmental NGOs have
challenged the legality of this planning consent on climate grounds. The
Judicial Review case centres on the failure of the council’s Environmental
Impact Assessment to take into consideration the climate change impacts
resulting from the combustion of the estimated 3.3 million tonnes of
produced oil. The potential of this case to have a national impact on
planning policy and a global impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions
elevates Horse Hill from a local ‘NIMBY’ planning dispute to an emblem-
atic struggle against fossil fuel extractivism as a root cause of the climate
crisis.
Somewhat paradoxically, the legal challenge to the Horse Hill deci-
sion puts its faith in the systems, institutions and epistemologies upon
which extractivism also relies. In the politically conservative area in which
Horse Hill is located, the legal appeal is regarded as a respectable route
for campaigners and has received significant financial support from locals.
Before climate change hit the mainstream in 2019, thanks to the publicity
brought to the issue by Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future,
Horse Hill campaigners found their climate change concerns failed to
engage the public or could be politically divisive. Meanwhile, the (inten-
tional) confusion and lack of clarity surrounding onshore oil extraction
techniques and their relation to the fracking industry had made it diffi-
cult to mobilise people around unknown but potentially significant risks.
Peaceful anti-fracking protests and direct action at Horse Hill and at other
sites in the area posed a threat to company operations, and the compa-
nies sought to deter protest by pursuing legal injunctions. At Horse Hill,
the company was able to essentially buy a far-reaching injunction against
‘persons unknown’, preventing anyone from partaking in specified legal
activities which could interfere with the profitability of the company.
Campaigners successfully challenged this attack on their right to protest,
and the injunction was scaled back as a result, but recently introduced
laws continue to criminalise dissent by dramatically increasing the punish-
ment and sentencing of peaceful protest. Whilst the state continues to
reshape policy and law in the interests of corporate extractivism, the judi-
cial review appeal seeks to flip accusations of criminality and remains the
centre point of the campaign.
Putting climate change at the centre of the campaign and legal chal-
lenge makes Horse Hill emblematic of the UK government’s willingness
to sacrifice both the countryside and the climate to fossil fuel interests.
Many Horse Hill campaigners care deeply about climate change, some-
times based on their own international experience in less economically
developed (previously colonised) countries and an understanding of the
global impacts and injustices of climate change. Others have become
more recently concerned by climate change, with heightened aware-
ness brought not only through activism but through lived experience
of record-breaking heatwaves, droughts and energy prices which will
impact the people and natural environments they love and care about.
Connecting both local and global climate concerns to Horse Hill as a site
of climate culpability, opens the opportunity to consider this local expe-
rience as part of a constellation of globally dispersed struggles against
both the nearby and distant experiences of social, ecological and climatic
impacts of extractivism.
We see this as an opening for building solidarity and for activism that
addresses the ongoing coloniality of climate change by positioning citi-
zens everywhere against extractivism everywhere, casting blame firmly on
polluting and land-grabbing industries and the institutions they rely on
rather than falling into the guilt-traps of individualistic (carbon footprint)
or mis-anthropic (‘humans are to blame’) climate activism.
Alice: At a demonstration staged at Horse Hill as part of the Global
Day of Action for Climate Justice during COP26, campaigners shared
a recorded message from campaigners in Mozambique bringing a legal

challenge against a UK government agency for funding a new mega gas
project incompatible with the Paris Agreement climate commitments. The
project has already forced thousands of people out of their homes and
livelihoods and fuelled violent conflict and human rights abuses in the
Cabo Delgado region. In the recording, the campaigner from Justiça
Ambiental/ Friends of the Earth Mozambique expressed their solidarity
with the Horse Hill case, urging those in Britain to support both cases
and put pressure on the justice system.
Across the vastly different everyday experiences of extractivism, here
is an opening through which the us/them narrative can be reimagined
towards a common struggle against extractive corporations and the state
systems that enable them.
How Is a Mainstream Climate Narrative Expanding and Deepening

(the Coloniality) of Extractivism?
The previous dialogue illustrates the strategic mobilisation by activists of
the climate change narrative as a way of connecting cause and effect,
and as a (legal) tool with which to fight the local, everyday impacts of
extractivism. In the same contexts, the climate narrative has also been
used (co-opted) by extractive industries and states to legitimise the expan-
sion and deepening of extractivism. Writing about the lithium triangle in
Latin America, Voskoboynik and Andreucci (2022) describe how state
and corporate discourses that justify extractive projects extend beyond an
association with modernity and development, towards a strong ecolog-
ical imaginary. Lithium extraction is presented as environmentally benign,
through narratives of climate change, sustainability and the ‘green econ-
omy’. Their discussion invites us to reflect on the situatedness of climate
narratives: who mobilises a climate story and to what effect?
Mai: Feminist political ecology recognizes the multidimensionality of
power relations among and between humans and in more-than-human
relationships, leading to a global climate change crisis. However, the
mainstream narrative of climate change separates society and nature and,
accompanied by a sense of global urgency, centres on the technolog-
ical fix and market solution or is limited to various earthly indicators of
climate change. It makes the problem of climate change seem unrelated
to people’s everyday activities. Using the language becomes a political
strategy to keep away the issue of climate change from everyday people’s
survival and resistance. One example is by associating the “climate” with

“carbon”, leading to the reason and answer of climate change being all
that is related to “low carbon”, including “reducing carbon emissions”,
or “low carbon development”.
In Indonesia, one of these low-carbon developments is attached to
the development of energy projects, including geothermal, because it has
low-carbon emissions, including low sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
One example of such projects is the Wae Sano geothermal project on
Flores Island. In the local media, the geothermal company even asked
residents and local government to play an active role in overcoming the
increase in earth’s temperature due to climate change by supporting the
geothermal project. However, the community is worried that this project
will dry up the biggest lake in the area, which is the source of agricul-
tural irrigation and water for daily needs. On June 7, 2022, I met Yoseph
Erwin, one of Wae Sano’s residents who resisted the geothermal project.
“One of our small sources of water, which was originally clear and hot and
can be used to boil eggs, has now turned hot and yellow, even though it
is only at the project exploration stage”, he said. Wae Sano people who
refuse the geothermal project are not only labelled as anti-development
but also have the potential to be labelled as a climate unfriendly. Those
who use a “carbon” narrative are not only narrowing the perspective
used to understand the roots of climate change but are also potentially
supporting misguided solidarity with all that is claimed as “low carbon”,
further supporting the green guise of oppression.
Alice: As the climate crisis worsens, a rapid and radical phasing out
of fossil fuels is urgently required. This truth is obscured by policies and
narratives that legitimise new fossil fuel extraction as part of the solu-
tion. The adoption and co-option of the language of climate action by
industry and state to legitimise new oil extraction at Horse Hill in the
South of England is an expansion and deepening of both the physical
frontiers and the logics of extractivism. Following a decade of protest
and diminishing public support for onshore hydrocarbon exploration in
England promoted as an opportunity for energy security and economic
growth, the mainstreaming of climate change concerns in 2019 provided
a new vocabulary of ‘climate mitigation opportunity’ upon which onshore
oil extraction could be pinned.
Rather than demonstrable facts, the climate mitigation opportunity
narrative pushed by UKOG (the Horse Hill operators) is based on loose
and generalised commitments to reducing carbon emissions which refuse
to concede economic prosperity to socio-ecological viability. At the Surrey

County Council planning meeting in 2019, UKOG representatives made
a number of claims attesting to their commitments to emissions reduc-
tions and support for the energy transition, including the claim (found
in court to be unevidenced) that oil produced at Horse Hill would have
a lower carbon footprint because of energy savings from transportation.
Acknowledgements of the need for decarbonisation were always caveated
by the explicit assumptions that this should not risk “current levels of
prosperity” and hence “oil and gas will have a significant role to play
for some time to come”. This closely followed the policies and language
of Net Zero 2050 and Transition adopted by the government to legit-
imise the logics of incremental change and postponement rather than
immediate climate action addressing the root causes.
By paying lip service to climate concerns and framing economic bene-
fits as incontestable, the company sought to undermine the claims of
climate activists and portray them as naive or ignorant. This was further
exemplified in the planning meeting by UKOG’s claims that they “are
as committed to contributing to and safeguarding our local environment
as any of our detractors”, co-opting the narrative of environmental care
in an attempt to add to their own credentials whilst casting the genuine
environmental concerns of the public as irrelevant. This tactic was used
more explicitly to greenwash and legitimise their case that new oil is
needed to support a low-carbon economy, claiming “even Greta Thun-
berg endorses the use of oil-based products by sailing in a high-tech
yacht made of strong lightweight oil-derived carbon fibre composite”.
This comment caused members of the public at the committee meeting to
break their silence with expressions of disbelief; the audacity of claiming a
renowned climate activist would support their project made campaigners
feel insulted and gaslighted.
Through this combination of spin and mistruths reliant on the vocab-
ulary of climate action, the greenwashing of oil production effectively
denies the already unfolding reality (and coloniality) of climate impacts
and delays climate action. New resource frontiers, from Indonesian islands
to the English countryside, are legitimised as sacrifice zones to support
the growth of a ‘green economy’. As the physical frontiers expand, so too
do the depths of extractivist logics and relations. The narrative of climate
change as a call to slowly decarbonise rather than to rapidly degrow the
economy legitimises the creation of new ‘green’ industries and requires
new or rebranded ‘green’ extractivisms. That extractivism can be legit-

imised by the climate change narrative illustrates the need to push for
narratives that foreground system change and target industries respon-
sible for multiple intersecting socio-ecological injustices rather than ‘just’
the impacts of carbon emissions.
The Coloniality of Climate Responses

Our second set of dialogues reflects on how the meaning of ‘green
actions’ originating in the Global North with the aim of reducing carbon
emissions travel to the Global South. We ask, what effects do the travelling
of these ideas, which may be presented as a form of global environmental
care, have on the local communities in terms of their livelihoods and lives?
How do these ideas travel and what are the risks involved in generalised
narratives, solutions or solidarities that do not have a nuanced under-
standing of the different forms or modes of production? Here, Eunice
and Dian reflect from the contexts of pastoralists raising livestock in Kenya
and smallholder communities in Kalimantan, Indonesia who are seeking
livelihoods from the cultivation of oil palm in the spaces between the
large-scale corporate plantations.
Eunice: Since the launch of the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organizations (FAO) Livestock’s Long Shadow report (Steinfeld et al.,
2006) and more recently, the EAT-Lancet Report on healthy diets in the
Anthropocene (Willett et al., 2019) calls to reduce consumption of live-
stock and livestock products as a solution to reducing greenhouse gases
emissions have become common. There has been a massive dietary tran-
sition to vegetarian, vegan and white meat diets. While acknowledging
that livestock production, like all other forms of agricultural production
contribute to GHG emissions and must be aligned to mitigation efforts,
these reports fail to differentiate between different ways of raising live-
stock, which have varying impacts on the environment (Scoones, 2021).
Livestock and livestock products are blamed, rather than the method
and scale of production. In addition, these mainstream climate narratives
fail to recognize the benefits that some of the production systems like
extensive pastoralism have for safeguarding the environment, livelihoods,
and human lives. These benefits include reducing poverty, expanding
livelihood opportunities, improving access to protein in diets, providing
transport to the local communities (García-Dory et al., 2021). Thus, the
focus ought to be on the production system rather than livestock and

meat itself.
Pastoralism is an important form of extensive livestock production
where pastoralists keep cattle, goats, sheep, camels, yaks, reindeers, and
llamas on rangeland environments like deserts, savannas, steppes, arctic
tundra, Mediterranean hills, and mountains, where alternative feasible
livelihoods do not exist (Scoones, 2021). Such low input livestock
production systems use rangelands with minimal inputs, have a lower
climate, biodiversity, and water impact than the current climate narratives
suggest. Compared to the intensive industrial systems, these extensive
production systems can offer broader livelihood and ecosystem bene-
fits. Through skilled grazing and different forms of mobility, pastoralists
make use of pastures, grasslands, and shrubs, making the most of vari-
ability and climate related uncertainty (Scoones, 2021). Generalising all
livestock production as harmful risks destroying low impact pastoralist
livelihoods in Kenya that have nothing to do with damaging industrial
livestock systems. This highlights the need to differentiate the impacts
and contributions to environmental degradation between intensive and
extensive livestock production.
To a large extent the narrative of a product, rather than its production
method, being bad for the environment resonates with the oil palm case-
explained by Dian, where the effects of palm oil boycotts are already being
experienced by the local communities growing oil palm. Although the
boycotts of livestock and their products have yet to take shape in Kenya,
it may be a matter of time as such information travels across the globe.
Already, several of my friends and peers have heeded to the rampant
calls to boycott livestock and livestock products and have converted into
vegetarianism and veganism for environmental reasons. This trend will
be fast tracked by the strong presence of European expatriate commu-
nity in the country who are already searching for vegetarian options in
the local restaurants, thus increasing demand. While their commitment is
admirable, I often feel there is a gap in understanding what exactly makes
livestock bad for the environment. The narrative risks boycotting prod-
ucts from people who have contributed minimally to the current global
crisis we are going through, thus punishing them further.
The intrinsic connection between the Maasai and their cattle is stronger
than just financial gains. Although there is the financial benefit of livestock
keeping, most of them consider their livestock as important members of
their family, illustrated in how they care for and relate with their live-
stock. Unlike in my community and others engaging in intensive livestock
production, where the calf is separated from its mother upon birth, the
Maasai cow and calf remain together until a new calf is born. This means
that the calf continually suckles until it’s mature enough. I also noticed
that the calves were allowed to suckle on one side as women milked the
cows. This allows the mother–calf relationship to blossom. Livestock is
often counted according to their parental lineage rather than numbers.
Every evening the household women would count the livestock in rela-
tion to their mother’s. It was also common to purchase livestock to be
slaughtered in the markets rather than slaughter one of their own. One
study participant explained that his familial relationship with his live-
stock deterred him from slaughtering them: “It is like slaughtering a
family member”. Many development NGOs find this paradoxical, espe-
cially during droughts, where livestock owners risk going without food
rather than slaughter one of their animals. As an example, during my
fieldwork, one of the study participant’s cow’s udder was eaten by hyenas
at night. When the herders reported the incident to the owner, I assumed
that the cow would be slaughtered for meat immediately as its capacity to
produce milk had been compromised. To my surprise, the owner sought
a traditional healer’s services to sew the udder and apply medical plants
to ensure it healed. The owner knew the cow wouldn’t produce milk but
still held on to it rather than sell it off to the butcher. Upon inquiry, she
responded that it was her best cow and had given her a lot of milk in
its lifetime, and she would continue taking care of it even though it may
never produce milk anymore.
Dian: Eunice reminds me of the supposedly green action of boycotting
palm oil for its association with deforestation. Both actions, which find
purchase initially with consumers in Global North, purport to care for
the more-than-human. Yet the next in the queue—rural people in the
Global South—are lost when these actions travel over space to the land
of producers.
In the Global North, consumers perceived the action to boycott oil
palm as the only way to save the planet. When I was grocery shop-
ping in Brighton in the UK, I read “this product does not contain oil
palm” on many items—this lack of palm oil was framed as an intrinsi-
cally good quality and a selling point. There was constant news in the
mass media telling me that oil palm cultivation is a main contributor to
climate change and the culprit behind the forest fires, orangutan killings,
and deforestation.
In the oil palm community context, where a previously forested land-
scape was replaced by large-scale oil palm, everyday life changed in ways
that varied across communities, depending on intersections of power
based around gender, class, ethnicity, migrant status, proximity to local
power, and peoples’ relation with oil palm. The oil palm companies also
matter. While researchers agree that large-scale oil palm companies nega-
tively impact the landscape, humans and more-than-humans, there are
some differences in experiences: where a few companies left communi-
ties with some wriggle-room for survival and where other companies
did not. Where communities have this wriggle-room, some small-scale
farmers have been inspired to plant the tree themselves and benefit from
it. While mostly we hear about large-scale corporations and their extrac-
tivist impacts, in Indonesia (which produces most palm oil in the world),
40% of total oil palm area is accounted for by small-scale independent
farmers. For these smallholders, planting oil palm trees is to improve
their livelihood and to care for their family, not for accumulating profit
at any cost to the humans involved, as in large-scale companies. The goal
is survival and bettering life for future generations. Below, I draw out the
different stories that come from these communities, based on research
I undertook whilst working as a research officer at CIFOR (Center for
International Forestry Research) in Indonesia.
An indigenous middle-aged woman who comes from a lower economic
background showed us her everyday life. She wakes at 3am to start caring
for her rubber plot, and to cook and prepare her 6-year-old child for
school before boarding the truck that takes her to the oil palm plantation
where she is employed as a casual worker. She earns less than 6 USD per
day and works from 7am to 3 pm. She occasionally needs to tend her rice
field after her work in oil palm plantations. She said that what she earns
is barely enough to get by every day and meet her family’s needs. She
worries that her first daughter, who is in high school, might not finish
school. She hopes that her two daughters have a better life than hers
(CIFOR, 2017a).
A second story comes from a young Indigenous couple who are perma-
nent workers on an oil palm plantation, receiving a monthly salary, with
extra if they harvest more than the target. They said that achieving the
target is not easy but doable if they work hard. The couple have a small
child who is taken care of by the couple’s parents when the couple works
in the plantation. For this couple (the husband is a migrant from another
village), oil palm gives them hope to start their own plots and a small
shop for their future. They said that they don’t want to let go of their
harvester’s work for the company even if they have their own plot and
small shop in the future already (CIFOR, 2017b).
A final story comes from an Indigenous leader in the village who has
managed to save some land. He has started his own oil palm but is anxious
as he has no access to knowledge and necessary resources (seedlings,
fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) to do it properly. He strongly states that if the
companies can benefit from oil palm, the villagers should be able to as
well. He witnessed other communities who have prospered from oil palm.
He anxiously waited for his two-year-old oil palm trees to show results.
Oil palm trees begin to fruit after three years—if the fruit is bad at this
point, then the trees are bad trees, and they have to be cut. The first
important step to plant oil palm is making sure that the seedlings are
good. But access to this information is difficult if you don’t know who
to ask. As he puts it: “If those companies can make a lot of money and
improve their life from oil palm in our land, why should we only watch?
While we were here from the start?” (CIFOR, 2017c).
As we reflect on these stories together, we note the forms of coloniality
that re-emerge when green actions in the Global North are taken without
careful regard to the nuances of everyday lives in communities in the
Global South that are themselves under threat from extractivism. Super-
ficial understandings of community experiences mean green consumer
actions originating in the Global North risk extending injustices when
communities get swept up in broad-brush actions, and where political
actions are not targeted at the extractivist systems that are doing harm.
Specifically, what this can mean is a foreclosure of more sustainable, recip-
rocal ways of relating to animals through the ecosystems of pastoralism,
and to the land and forest, through smallholder oil palm cultivation
that presents possibilities for replenishing rather than depleting lives and
landscapes.
Extractivism’s Other: Concluding

Reflections on Alternatives
Mai
While the durian falls or is picked,

transported by wooden boats
brought to the house, neighbours, and local market
When the ‘tanah air’ is extracted,

transported by iron barges,
taken somewhere unknown
(In between spaces, Despite Extractivism exhibition 2022)
I imagine the durian, a forest tree that reaches 30–50 m high, with its
thorny fruit skin and soft, fragrant flesh of the fruit. Kalimantan Island is
the centre of Durian biodiversity. Biologists found 30 species of durian
grow in Kalimantan, with various skin fruit colours, some are yellow,
called Lay fruit, and Keruntungan is red. Durian tree mark out land
tenure in Indigenous communities, telling the story of a family’s lineage
and connection to land. Durian fruit is also a source of cash for education
fees (Maimunah & Agustiorini, 2021).
In Sungai Lalang, Central Kalimantan, the durian season is a joy,
marking the arrival of the fruit season. Durian trees are planted along
with other fruit crops scattered in people’s yards, tree-gardens and forests
along the river. The aroma of the fruit invites wild animals such as wild
boars, Mawat (fruit bats), binturong (weasels), and various types of birds
and nectar-eating beetles to approach. For the Murung people, this is
the time to hunt—while waiting to harvest the swidden. Men and some
women hunt pigs and other animals in the forest in the group. The durian
season means the season of collectivity. The activity in the village can
move to the durian forest until harvest time arrives. I saw small boats full
of durian fruit going back and forth on the Lalang river in the afternoon
and evening.
Consuming and processing durian fruit also requires communality. We
can eat fresh durian or consume it after it is processed into lempok and
tempoyak. Lempok is a durian lunkhead that can be stored for a long
time, while tempoyak is fermented durian flesh. In fermentation, microbes
break down the sugar and fat compounds to produce a healthier food.
Fermentation reduces the harmful effects of durian and diminishes harm

to our bodies, others, and the world around us (Fournier, 2020).
The durian season is a sign of inter-species relations, in contrast to the
extractivist relations that govern mining of coal in Kalimantan since the
colonial period-relations that harm and extract from old forests, rubber
plantations, fields, and orchards, including durian trees. Mining removes
topsoil, revealing solid black rock with a strong odour and combustion
smell. The black rock is taken and transported via hauling roads before
finally being sent on the rivers out of Kalimantan Island.
Alice
On a paved road, under the flight path of Gatwick airport, on the edges
of suburbia, in the heart of empire, outside an oil extraction site, is it
possible to imagine alternatives to extractivism? An alternative to fossil
fuel extraction is to ‘leave it in the ground’ and to instead pursue renew-
able energy sources, but as we have seen it is often not enough to replace
extractivism with green extractivism—the resources required for renew-
able infrastructure and the corporate nature of the industry often come
with environmental injustices. Perhaps less pragmatic but more critical are
the alternatives to the logics of extractivism, an abusive and dominating
way of seeing the Other as a resource to serve goals of accumulation.
In a handful of small but intentional ways, those opposed to oil
production at Horse Hill have thought and practised together some alter-
natives to extractivism. By staging protests, picnics and ceremonies at the
gates of the site, activists not only draw attention and bear witness to local
and climate impacts of the operations but also subvert extractivist logics
by physically occupying the space with our own sets of logics. Poignantly,
the Faith at the Gate events involve the sharing of readings, reflections
and silent meditation or prayer. These are occasions to celebrate the
abundance of nature and observe the changing seasons and to stand in
solidarity with others fighting climate, environmental and social injustices
here and elsewhere. Through these expressions of reverence and care, a
powerful juxtaposition is staged between the peaceful gathering at the
gates and the sacrilege of the disregard for the Other being perpetrated
on the other side of the gates.
Near the Horse Hill site are deposits of clay, historically used in the area
for brickmaking. Local potter Xanthe Maggs was inspired to find ways
to use this clay to support the Horse Hill campaign, such as through
community outreach workshops and the creation of ceramic badges.
Joining in with these experiments with clay, I was struck by the question
of what distinguishes our extraction of this material from the extraction of
the oil, and this in turn opened an invitation to consider what other, more
reciprocal kinds of relationship could be had with this land. Extractivism
is not only about the scale or the consequences of the extraction, but
also about the intent: extracting a resource for personal gain is inherently
distinct from extracting a material for the purpose of creatively inspiring
care for the land and climate. Clay creations have been auctioned to
fundraise for the legal case, and a clay bead travelled from Horse Hill
to Glasgow with an activist joining the ‘Camino to COP26’ pilgrimage,
walking across the UK to bring messages from communities to the COP.
Care for the land through walking and being in the landscape seems
to be capturing the popular imagination in England at a time of increased
recognition of the physical and mental health benefits of being in nature
that emerged from the Covid-19 lockdowns, and the increased awareness
of nature’s vulnerability as the climate breaks down. New campaigns for
the Right to Roam, including days of peaceful Mass Trespass, have been
supported by some Horse Hill campaigners and draw attention to the lack
of public access to the English countryside and the controversial history
of private land ownership and inheritance by elites. This includes land
acquired by slave owners through the publicly funded compensation they
received as a result of the abolition of slavery. Access to nature in England
remains intimately tied to colonialism in such ways, and the campaign
seeks to encourage responsible access to nature to counter disconnec-
tion and exclusion from the land. This campaign goes hand in hand with
campaigns against the industrialisation of the countryside through extrac-
tive projects and has the potential to bring care for local nature and land
rights into conversation with care for global climate impacts, injustices
and extractivisms.
We began this chapter with our reflections from COP26, refracted
through our different positionalities and rooted networks within the
coloniality of contrasting extractive contexts around the world. As we
have woven the threads of our stories together, our dialogues have been
knotted around the root causes of climate change—extractivism, injustice
and disconnection from nature. When we draw the coloniality of extrac-
tivism more closely into the weave, we see how extractive injustices are
being reproduced in green economy ‘false solutions’ and are perpetu-
ated in broad-brush green actions emanating from the Global North,
where insufficient regard is paid to nuanced community perspectives. Our
reflections and stories connect with the efforts of activist movements to

decolonise climate and environmental justice and to mount a robust chal-
lenge to the simplifications that arise from fixating on carbon emissions
without addressing systemic issues that derange human and more-than-
human relationships on and with land and water. Feminist political
ecology provides us with the tools to create a closer weave, threading
through an analysis of extractivism with lived experience, of commu-
nities and of ourselves as researchers and activists. Through FPE, we
attend to situated knowledges that shape storytelling in all its forms, from
the climate vocabularies of corporate and state actors to the languages
mobilised to tell stories of extractive harms.
We have closed our chapter with reflections on the possibilities for what
Sultana (2022) evocatively refers to as the restructuring of relationships
to ecologies, waters, lands and communities to which we are intimately,
materially and politically connected. As we juxtapose our reflections and
stories, we listen for ways to recover or amplify sustainable alternatives to
the logics of extractivism. In closing the chapter, we open up the possi-
bilities within FPE, which provides a convening space for exploring the
opposite of extractivism: relationships between humans and more-than-
human natures based around stewardship, reciprocity, regeneration and
ensuring life for future generations through healthier ways of relating to
the land.
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holder.
CHAPTER 3
Extracting Us: Co-curating Creative

Responses to Extractivism Through
a Feminist Political Ecology Praxis
The Extracting Us Curatorial Collective
Alice Owen, Siti Maimunah, Dian Ekowati,

Rebecca Elmhirst, and Elona M. Hoover
Introduction
Extractivism—the logic that enables large-scale resource extraction and
the exploitation of people and nature—has inspired a raft of responses
from artists and creatives. Often, these responses take shape through
A. Owen (B) · D. Ekowati · R. Elmhirst · E. M. Hoover

Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics, University of Brighton,
Brighton, UK
e-mail: A.Owen@brighton.ac.uk
D. Ekowati
e-mail: Dee.ekowati@gmail.com
R. Elmhirst
e-mail: R.J.Elmhirst@brighton.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_3
52 A. OWEN ET AL.
aesthetics of the industrial sublime, with vast and person-less landscapes

of ruination which provoke an awe-inspired inertia. Such portrayals,
while effectively conveying the spectacular scale of resource extraction
(Koch, 2022; Traynor, 2021), tend to overlook the everyday violence
of extractivism in the lives and life worlds of those living in spaces that
colonial logics and extractive capital have constituted as ‘extractive zones’
(Gómez-Barris, 2017) or who are otherwise entangled in the web of
extractivism. Moreover, the agency and ongoing-ness of communities and
individuals living despite or in resistance to extractivism is often hidden
from view.
This chapter shares the journey of a curatorial collective that takes
on the challenges of looking at extractivism through the lens of feminist
political ecology (FPE). It tells the story of an initiative called Extracting
Us which was born out of a meeting between scholar-activists based in
the United Kingdom and Indonesia; of conversations, meetings and the
sharing of worlds and experiences. From this encounter came a desire
to speak to issues of extractivism very specific to a geographical context
(East Kalimantan), but that we knew could cross boundaries, borders and
times. Engaging with FPE, we foregrounded the experiences and agency
of communities on the frontlines of this extractive zone, paying atten-
tion to how power over the environment—which follows the contours
of coloniality, race and patriarchy—not only reshapes landscapes but
limits the possibilities for thriving, with devastating consequences. With
this came a need to shift perspectives of extractivism from the univer-
salising, the spectacular, and extractive aesthetic objectification towards
curating creative forms from the frontlines of extractivism. These perspec-
tives instead centre the gaze on the everyday as the time–space where
extractivism is both experienced and resisted.
In the three years that our curatorial collective has worked together,
‘extractivism’ as a theme and ‘organising concept’ (Chagnon et al., 2022)
has become much more prominent in academic, activist and artistic
discourse and practice, exceeding its earlier definitions as a political-
economic regime of commodity extraction and export (Acosta, 2013) to
consider extractivism as a mindset or way of thinking (Willow, 2018).
S. Maimunah
e-mail: Mai.jebing@gmail.com
3 EXTRACTING US: CO-CURATING CREATIVE RESPONSES … 53
Black and Indigenous perspectives on environmental justice highlight

colonialism and racial capitalism within extractivist logics (Chagnon et al.,
2022; LaDuke & Cowen, 2020; Wynter, 2003). We therefore situate
Extracting Us in a wider set of conversations that were evolving and
unfolding along a similar path to us (for example, Arts Catalyst, 2019;
Tsing et al., 2017; Ureta & Flores, 2022, The Global Extractivisms and
Alternatives Initiative (EXALT) at the University of Helsinki). Extracting
Us has grown collectively, from 2019 to the time of writing in 2022,
through our curation of a series of three exhibitions and accompanying
events with artists, activists and researchers engaged in what Gómez-
Barris (2021, p. 855) refers to as ‘the arts of land and water defence’. The
process of collaborative curation, with its emphasis on creative-political
enquiry and on thinking and doing ‘otherwise’, has also led us to think
anew (and across our different positionalities) about what we understand
as extractivism and how this is informed by the practice of FPE.
We weave together our conversations about the curatorial process,
exploring different ways of articulating and responding to extractivism
through integrating art, activism and research. In doing so, we specu-
late about the ways in which these influence each other. Our process
for this chapter involves us each reflecting upon the various points of
our journey through the curation of Extracting Us at ONCA Gallery in
2019, Extracting Us online in 2020, and Despite Extractivism online in
2021–2022. In recording our reflections, we adopt an FPE practice that
coalesces around plural ways of seeing, thinking and learning relation-
ally. The text therefore retains messiness as we shift between collective
and individual voices. We seek to avoid flattening out our differences
within our collaborative curation: a long process involving three exhi-
bitions, dozens of institutions and hundreds of people across different
continents.
We have organised our reflections around four elements of the project:
the process of curating and building our collaboration across boundaries,
the practice of weaving materials and conversations through the exhibi-
tions, the care-full interventions we have made as we join up art, academia
and activism in extractive contexts. and finally, the ways this project has
expanded our understanding of extractivism and our practice of feminist
political ecology.
54 A. OWEN ET AL.
Curating Across Boundaries

It all started with the story around the Mahakam River, the second largest
river in Indonesia, located in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Here (there),
the largest coal exploitation site in Indonesia is slowly eroding life around
the city of Samarinda. One of us, Siti Maimunah (Mai) has embodied
experiences working with JATAM (Jaringan Advokasi Tambang/Mining
Advocacy Network, Indonesia) and a group of mothers whose children
drowned after falling into abandoned mining pits in East Kalimantan
a decade ago. From her encounters around the Mahakam River, the
story flowed through meetings with Elona Hoover, Becky Elmhirst, Dian
Ekowati and Alice Owen in Brighton, and then the idea of the exhibition
emerged.
The confluence that brought stories of extractivism from the Mahakam
river into conversation with researchers and activists in Brighton, UK, was
enabled by the EU-funded Wellbeing, Ecology, Gender and cOmmunity
(WEGO) early stage researcher network that brought two of us (Mai and
Dian) from Indonesia to the UK to an initial collaboration with Alice and
Becky (WEGO early stage researcher and mentor respectively) and post-
graduate researcher Elona Hoover in Brighton in the summer of 2019.
Brighton is a city on England’s south coast, far from East Kalimantan,
but linked through the hidden threads of UK corporate investments that
profit from mineral exploitation. It is also a place where conversations
and actions in search of ecological justice are flourishing, in spaces such
as ONCA Gallery and the University of Brighton’s Centre for Spatial,
Environmental and Cultural Politics (C-SECP).
ONCA Gallery is a Brighton-based arts charity ‘that bridges social
and environmental justice issues with creativity’ (ONCA, 2022) and
was also an important locus for young people in Brighton who were
engaged in the #FridaysForFuture Youth Strikes for Climate. Conversa-
tions that took place between Mai and Elona in ONCA’s kitchen and
backyard coalesced around the everyday impacts of coal extraction in Kali-
mantan, and serendipitously led to the first exhibition titled ‘Extracting
Us. Looking Differently: Feminism, Politics and Coal Extraction’. The
name of ‘Extracting Us’ emerged from the philosophy of the Mollo
indigenous peoples in Indonesia: ‘destroying nature is like destroying our
human body’.
The planning, discussions and activities that swirled around this exhi-
bition brought the five of us together—Elona, Mai, Alice, Dian and
Becky—as a curatorial collective: we are the ‘We’ in this chapter, each

bringing our own experiences and ideas. Yet, this ‘We’ also risks conflating
individual positionalities and standpoints: different experiences of living
and researching in Global North and South contexts, different life/work
stages, varying care responsibilities in differing everyday time-spaces, and
different postures, skills and knowledges in relation to research, activism
and art practice.
This ‘We’ also falls short of embracing all those that are part of
this story. The first exhibition (Brighton, July 2019) involved Mai’s
activist networks, notably JATAM, who helped with design work and
communication for the exhibition, and the London Mining Network.
WEGO provided a relational space of feminist political ecology learning
and funding for many of our activities, C-SECP provided material and
intellectual support for engaged research activities connecting creativity
and environmental justice, and the ONCA Gallery directors provided
practical and critical input and connections with activists and further
artists-researchers.
We began to feel our way… The collective continues to be shaped by
the collaborations that grew along the way and that helped us establish
our curatorial principles, including challenging North–South narratives on
extractivism, foregrounding accessibility, and in bringing in the perspec-
tives of those most affected. These collaborations also enabled us to curate
across boundaries—of knowledges, geographies and temporalities.
Elona: I feel grateful for the human connections, for the relationships
we made through the process. For the way in which it allowed me to
express my own and each of our potentials: artistic, academic, activist, and
practical. We could use knowledges and capacities that are often boxed
into different spheres.
Becky: I felt engaged, stretched, challenged and at times, outside my
comfort zone. Some aspects, particularly early on, made me feel deeply
uneasy—a version of imposter syndrome perhaps, pushing against disci-
plinary boundaries that I wouldn’t normally traverse, and entering into
ethical territory that I perhaps had avoided previously.
It felt like we formalised the curatorial collective when we proposed
a second iteration of the exhibition for the POLLEN (Political Ecology
Network) conference—originally to be hosted in Brighton in June 2020
and moved online due to the pandemic to September 2020. This involved
making our curatorial principles more explicit as we invited contributors
to join an expanded ‘Extracting Us’ project that sought to bring together
56 A. OWEN ET AL.
feminist political ecology perspectives and extractivism. These principles

articulated feminist political ecology loosely, inviting contributions that
thought about extractivism in terms of materials from (and of) the earth
as well as in terms of human and more-than-human experiences and ener-
gies. We sought contributions that listened to perspectives from those
most affected, and that included narratives of resistance.
Elona: I was excited about being able to create and maintain connec-
tions through the pandemic, finding ways of adapting the exhibition and
modes of collaboration with curators and contributors in troubled times…
while giving space to those for whom adapting was not possible or even
violent.
The attention and care for contributors also extended to our collec-
tive. This became particularly important when we crossed the boundary
from physical to virtual, shifting the collaborative Extracting Us exhibi-
tion online in the (northern) Spring of 2020 because of the COVID-19
pandemic. As we dispersed to different ‘homes’ and countries, we held
our collective together with regular meetings, working across four time
zones (UK, France, Germany and Indonesia) and checking in on each
other. Countless hours of discussions, tensions, laughs and tears. Collab-
orating and trying our best not to extract from each other. Some
individuals still work more than others. Some feel regret that they cannot
contribute more. Some lost good friends, fell ill, took care of ill loved
ones. Yet our growing familiarity with being together online in the strange
intimacy of each other’s home spaces helped dissolve physical distances,
even as our experiences with the pandemic diverged. Slowly and organi-
cally, we took time to consider, reflect, and think about how We produced
knowledge and work related to our daily lives and in relation with others.
Dian: The Extracting Us curatorial collective helped me through the
pandemic and the loneliness during our PhD study and its solitude. We
had good news when a member of the collective (Elona) was expecting
and delivered a beautiful person in 2021.
Alice: Moving online actually made for different kinds of connections.
In those early days of the pandemic there was a sense of connecting
despite and because of our isolation. Catching up with and working with
the collective heightened my awareness of the privileges I experienced
in my daily life (health, home, job and economic security, loving family
and friends) and gave me a stronger awareness of the time involved in
care responsibilities and commitments that I did not have. Similarly, the
curation process allowed me to recognise material differences between
the context shared in the exhibition and the context through which I
have been researching extractivism—oil extraction with relatively minor
local impacts in a relatively privileged part of the South of England. This
awareness often led to feelings of guilt, and to a kind of paralysis from not
knowing what to do with these privileges. It made me feel like I should be
doing more for this project, yet at the same time I didn’t want to impose
and risk losing the horizontality and collectivity.
Becky: Although connecting online for meetings and webinars was a
balm early on in the pandemic, we quickly became aware of highly differ-
entiated and uneven experiences of COVID-19 pandemic as this overlaid
and amplified existing inequalities associated with coloniality and extrac-
tivist logics. Farhana Sultana has written powerfully about the pandemic,
climate and coloniality as overlapping crises (Sultana, 2021) and clearly
each of us was differently positioned in relation to this. When we met
with contributors online, personal introductions were punctuated with
harrowing stories of bereavement and fear in the face of failing health
services or inexplicable political responses in different corners of the
world. Reciprocity and care via Zoom became an integral part of our
feminist practice.
Elona: After we had launched the end of the second iteration, I also
had a clear desire to pass things on. I had been leading more at that
moment but did not want the process to be tied to one person. I think
of this as a feminist practice of attachment and detachment (Ahmed,
2012). It was then my turn to take a step back, and with the third and
last iteration I felt overwhelmed when I was not able to contribute any
more—trusting that I would not be left out when I found the time again.
Our reflections narrate a messy process, as we worked with the bound-
aries of each other’s realities, tried to learn to relate and sought out ways
to reflect that in our work. Donna Haraway’s (2016) idea of ‘staying with
the trouble’ describes our process well: it reminds us of the layers of diffi-
culties and emotions faced by those who live in an extractive landscape,
and how we continue to care for each other. We also connect with Cindy
Katz’s description of ‘messiness’ in trying to constitute ‘the field’ where
this is not something that can be sanitised from the researcher’s everyday
life and positionality (Katz, 1994). The story of how we sought to curate
across boundaries (of experience, geography and coloniality) and the
journey of our collaboration amidst the structural pressures of academia,
activisms and global pandemic is something akin to a river. Like the flow
58 A. OWEN ET AL.
of a river, it was shaped by a palimpsest landscape and, encountering unex-

pected obstructions, was disrupted and diverted without diminishing its
essential qualities.
Weaving Materials and Conversations

Our second set of reflections converges around what we learned as we
worked with the creative materials of the exhibitions (the photographs
that comprised the first exhibition in 2019, the works submitted by
contributors to the online Extracting Us exhibition in 2020 and its
later iteration in 2021, Despite Extractivism). The process of curating
exhibitions and events involved working with the collected materials to
unravel conversations, draw unexpected connections and pursue the lines
of inquiry that these inspired.
Our first exhibition, curated with the ONCA Gallery team in Brighton,
staged 46 photographs from a larger collection gathered over the years
by Mai and her collaborators in Indonesia. Mai and Elona spent hours
carefully selecting the photographs, initially trying to create a contrast
between visions of destroyed or empty landscapes and photos of everyday
lives. In creating juxtapositions, the exhibition aimed to show how fami-
lies and communities are continually devastated by the impacts of coal
mining and abandoned coal pits, which have a colonial legacy linking to
the UK where the exhibition was shown.
Alice: For me the moment when I really ‘got it’ was when we all
gathered to group the photographs. It was the first time I’d properly
seen them, and the stories of the people in the photographs which Mai
recounted to us were suddenly so visceral and powerful. In that room
of women, mothers and daughters, I sensed the gravity of our responsi-
bility to share and make sense of the stories of the women and children
who looked back at us from the photographs. In that session, experi-
menting with ways of grouping and juxtaposing the images, I began to
see the importance of a feminist political ecology lens for extractivism. For
me, it’s about paying attention to and taking seriously the ways conflicts
over nature are experienced through the everyday and through embodied
and emotional registers. This applies both ‘in the field’ as we come to
understand the experiences of the communities we research with, and in
ourselves as we think and feel our way through our research practices in
ways not detached from the rest of our lives or selves.
In the gallery, the photographs were arranged in five clusters. Each

centred around a large-scale photograph which showed extractive land-
scapes with massive physical damage, such as floods surrounding the
entire Samarinda city, the loss of farmland, abandoned toxic pits, land-
slides, and the impacts on villages. These were juxtaposed with smaller
photographs of dead children’s faces in coal pits, uncovering the preda-
tory character of the mines: extractivisms destroy and deprive social
relations, womb relations, knowledge and care. Photographs of resistance
actions were included in every photograph cluster, capturing the agency
of communities in responding while avoiding pathos and victim narratives.
The emotional and personal connections evoked by the photog-
raphy and the accompanying invitations to respond were imagined as an
embodied experience that could foster response-ability (Haraway, 2016).
This goes beyond the typical academic work of exemplifying, adding
complexity to, or communicating the impacts of extractivism. Cultivating
response-ability involves creating a sense of connection and of agency
rather than being struck by the inertia of guilt or the overwhelming scale
of global extractivism.
Elona: Though I felt like an ‘outsider’ in terms of feminist political
ecology, I felt like I was able to bring a different perspective on how to
express some of the theoretical issues in practice: what affective strength
different images had together, the importance of the aesthetic, ways of
putting images on walls, or designing postcards and imagining together
how to involve people affectively in an exhibition. This was striking for
me when I created the overlay of the children’s faces with the mining pit
for the exhibition poster. Twenty faces. A deep pit. The scale of which I
start to see as the massive but minuscule mining machine hidden in its
bowels came to my attention. Dark earth. Lost lives.
Alice: Installing the exhibition at ONCA was a strange experience,
enjoying being together in the gallery space and getting excited about the
exhibition whilst confronting again the harrowing images. I remember in
particular how we positioned the photographs of Rahmawati, a mother
who had lost her child, at eye level—it gives me goosebumps even now
recalling the intimacy of those face-to-face encounters.
Dian: Despite coming from Indonesia, I did not ‘get’ it before, even
when Mai talked deeply about these issues. The stories of Raihan and
other lives lost in the mining pits are not something that I read in
everyday mainstream media. I remember sitting with the photos and the
collective in a small room in our university and how depressed I was by
60 A. OWEN ET AL.
the lost lives and mothers losing children, and by my own ignorance of
this situation (Fig. 3.1).
Maybe it was the quality of the photos, taken with phones, or photos
of photos taken in school, or photos of family portraits. There is an inti-
macy to the non-professional. These images brought home the everyday
violence of extractivism in ways images of vast extracted landscapes found
in a political ecology textbook cannot.
Moving the second Extracting Us exhibition online was a challenge for
the curatorial collective and contributors. We had to move from a prede-
fined exhibition space to an undefined online space, where we wanted to
create a feeling of visiting somewhere, of being immersed in the work of
different contributors, as well as including human interactions and shared
learning in a virtual space.
Fourteen contributors responded to our call for works relating to
feminist political ecologies of extractivism for the second Extracting Us
exhibition, sharing work from Tajikistan, Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago,
Brazil, Eastern Himalayas, Indonesia, Zambia, UK, Ecuador, Senegal,
France and India. Several had planned an object or performance-based
Fig. 3.1 Open cast coal mine, overlain with images of children who drowned
in abandoned coal pits (East Kalimantan, Indonesia)
contribution and found it challenging to move towards the digital.

Conversations focused on how to work through that without losing an
essence of the work and if it was worth it. For instance, Sandro Simon’s
work (focused on Senegal) was a series of six video loops that were meant
to be played on their own and/or simultaneously. Another contributor,
Maica Gugolati, whose work focuses on Trinidad, explained how she
had to first imagine an overcrowded soundscape in an embodied physical
space, and after that, it made sense to watch it online.
Our third exhibition, Despite Extractivism, was also online. In this iter-
ation, we brought together contributions from Indonesia, UK, Ireland,
Sweden, Senegal, the Urals in Russia and Spain, this time exploring how
communities care, resist and persist despite extractivism. For this, we
worked with independent curator Celina Loh, whose professional insights
on curation and the online exhibition development encouraged us to
consider questions around how we were communicating, with whom and
why. She helped us create a more ‘tactile’ virtual experience.
In both online exhibitions—Extracting Us and Despite Extractivism—
we had accompanying events where participants were also asked to engage
with physical objects in their surroundings. For example, we held a
webinar on creative engagements on the front line presented with exhi-
bition contributors at the POLLEN20 conference in which we invited
participants to respond creatively to what they were listening to and
seeing (Fig. 3.2).
We noted an affective involvement by asking people to draw and
inviting them to be engaged while they listened. We shared the doodles
towards the end of the webinar, including participants in the conversation
without necessarily sharing words. This active embodied engagement—in
the context of the ongoing pandemic and online webinar saturation—
became something we wanted to build on as we gained more confidence
in working through online spaces. As well as artists’ and activists’
presentations and discussions, the webinar series accompanying Despite
Extractivism invited audiences to engage in a different register by listening
to songs, poems, guided reflections and movement.
For example, during Arabel Lebrusan’s ‘Toxic Waves’ contribution
to Despite Extractivism at our webinar on embodiment, participants
were invited to simultaneously draw waves in time to 270 beats of a
metronome, representing the 270 people killed in the collapse of the
Minas Gerais iron ore tailings dam in Brazil in 2019. Through this
performance, Arabel explored the questions ‘Can art making, through
62 A. OWEN ET AL.
Fig. 3.2 Sharing creative responses to the Extracting Us webinar at the online
POLLEN conference (2020)
embodied thinking, activate our empathy at a deeper and more instinc-

tive level than our rational understanding of events? Can this urge us to
act? Can this help us grieve?’
Dian: The body movement of making the wave as part of Arabel’s
participatory performance art made me feel emotional. I felt anger, grief,
stress, connection with the community displaced by extractive forces. I felt
very tired afterwards (the event was held quite late from where I joined),
but when I tried to sleep on my comfortable clean bed and breathing
clean air, I remembered those whose lives have been extracted through
mining and do not have a clean bed to sleep on (and no clean air to
breath in) in the nights after struggling during their days. There were
feelings of solidarity and of guilt for not being able to give more ‘real
support’.
Care-Full Interventions
Integrating relational practices such as the work with materials mentioned
above was part of our curatorial process. The notion of ‘care’ emerged as a
major tributary to our river through our embodied experiences of a femi-
nist curation process and through the themes of our work together and
independently. In this section, we reflect on the ways we worked through
a politics of connection and solidarity, aligned with our curatorial prin-
ciple to develop solidarity actions aligned with the narratives of resistance
that were highlighted in the contribution of the three exhibitions.
As part of the first exhibition held at ONCA, we developed a series of
postcards that people could write and send to a range of people/actors
relevant to the context of coal mining in Indonesia as featured in the
exhibition. This included the mothers who had lost their children, local
NGOs, and local and national Indonesian politicians. As well as being in
the gallery for people to write independently, postcard-writing was inte-
grated into the event series. The exhibition was accompanied by a film
screening, talk, and workshop with youth climate protestors involved in
#FridaysForFuture. Ibu Rahima’s story was featured in the exhibition,
and exhibition visitors wrote and sent her solidarity postcards (Fig. 3.3).
Ibu Rahima’s 14-year-old son Raihan drowned in one of the aban-
doned coal pits in East Kalimantan. At the time when Indonesians
were celebrating Mother’s Day in 2014, Ibu Rahima demanded that the
Government close and clean up more than 250 abandoned coal pits in
the city of Samarinda. She visited Raihan’s former school, spoke to the
students about staying away from the pits and collected 10,000 signatures
for a petition which she gave to the Indonesian Minister for Environment
and Forestry. It was important to us to avoid pathos and a victim narra-
tive in the exhibition: as her story shows, Rahima is not a passive victim,
she is a survivor.
One year after the first exhibition, we received a short video from
Rahima. She was holding the postcards that had been sent by the exhi-
bition visitors. The exhibition had helped to uncover the connection
between Indonesia and the UK; the latter had benefited from the first
coal extracted and shipped from East Kalimantan for use in fuelling colo-
nial trade and warships. In her video, Rahima addressed the exhibition
64 A. OWEN ET AL.
Fig. 3.3 Solidarity postcards ready to be sent from the UK to Indonesia (2019)
participants: ‘Thank you for friends from the UK who have supported
me. With the blessings of God Almighty, I will continue the struggle to
get justice for the children who drowned in the (abandoned) coal pits’.
Becky: At first, many of the contributions in the first exhibition and
Extracting Us online exhibition gave me a profound sadness—a hope-
lessness, or rather, a sense of my own hopelessness in the face of what
communities were enduring and responding to. Was visibilising the
‘unseenness’ of extractivism’s violence sufficient? Taking part in the post-
card writing activity (and learning about the replies that came back from
the community), shifted my perspective as I recognised the possibilities
for relating otherwise through co-learning and solidarity across the fault
lines of racial capitalism and the coloniality of extractivism.
The process and reflections directed us to further develop curatorial
principles based on care-full interventions that: (i) challenge ‘north–
south’ narratives on extractivism, listen to perspectives from those
most affected, and develop actions of solidarity and resistance across
countries and continents; (ii) include narratives of resistance where

possible/relevant; and thus avoid relying on pathos that might develop an
‘us/them’ feeling; and (iii) develop solidarity actions during the exhibi-
tion, for instance engaging emotionally and physically with the exhibition
material.
These principles formed part of our invitation to contributors, and
all were invited to consider how opportunities for these kinds of soli-
darities could be integrated into their contributions. Every contribution
included website links to further information and to specific groups they
could support, or actions visitors could take. As curators, it is hard for
us to know how effective this has been in terms of those on the front-
lines of extractivism being or feeling supported. For us, what has been
more apparent is the way we have begun to build connections between
the contributors, the communities we are all connected to through our
work, and our visitors.
We began weaving connections between artists for the online exhibi-
tion, asking them for instance to visit the exhibition and join and video
call to comment on each other’s work. As the curatorial collective, we had
already spent some time finding our connections (the themes of the exhi-
bition), but different ideas such as ‘time’ emerged as potent concepts in
these discussions and the conversation flowed in unexpected directions.
Many artists found exciting resonances between others’ work and their
own and others, whether in terms of the content or the artistic modes
and practices engaged with. When we took these conversations into the
more public space of the POLLEN webinar, other kinds of connections
were made between the contributions and those participating.
Building on the richness of these discussions and the engagement we
felt from the online participants, for the Despite Extractivism iteration
of the exhibition we more deliberately curated the series of online time
spaces. Something we pay attention to in feminist political ecology is how
systems of power operate and are resisted across scales, and we decided
to theme the Despite Extractivism exhibition event series around this
idea, starting with the body and embodiment, expanding to commu-
nity, and finally considering worlding. These events took careful planning,
inviting artists, researchers and community groups to connect in advance
and prepare presentations or provocations. The stories told through the
exhibition and discussion workshops opened up new ways of under-
standing care as creative expressions which enable us to better recognise
66 A. OWEN ET AL.
and analyse multiple and often hidden ways of tending to each other and
more-than-human natures against or despite extractivism.
For those involved, there were poignant moments of connectivity,
despite our physical distance. During one of the Despite Extractivism
events, where contributor Dewi Candraningrum (Indonesia) discussed
her paintings of the Kartini Kendeng ecological defenders, she was accom-
panied by the background sound of a cricket chirping the onset of the dry
season in Central Java. This reminded us that the gossamer threads of soli-
darity that connected us across cyberspace involved other species beyond
our own.
Our efforts to convene events that would enable us to feel, experi-
ence and share together across worlds were not always successful: the
material limitations of online connections could let us down. A partic-
ularly regretful moment came when the Kartini Kendang were scheduled
to share their resistance song, but uneven bandwidths reminded us once
more about the ways uneven infrastructures replicated wider global injus-
tices and inequalities, and taught us once more about the importance of
accessibility if our feminist response to extractivism activism (or, following
Willow, 2018, our extrACTIVISM) was to have any real purchase.
Not all the contributors were able to join our events. In part, this
was because of the ‘flowing’ nature of our work, evolving slowly rather
than according to a master plan. We also lacked the capacity to make the
events truly inclusive by using alternative text for images or by ensuring
accessibility for those with hearing disabilities.
Becky: Our feminism aims to be postcolonial and intersectional—I’m
not sure I can quite describe it as decolonial. Some of our aspirations in
this direction have been difficult to fulfil—moving online meant dealing
with various forms of digital exclusion, and we have always struggled
with how to address the issues that come from working predominantly
in the English language, even as in the later work we sought to include
simultaneous translation in some of our events.
Expanding Orientations
Like the flow of a river, the story and bodily experience of creating
and curating the Extracting Us exhibitions has branched in unexpected
directions. It doesn’t matter whether we have flowed with the main
river or along one of its branches. Originally the Extracting Us exhibi-
tion was about mining coal and the predatory relationships and violent
logics of extractivism. The story of extractivism along the Mahakam

River is connected with extractivism in rivers, mountains, cities, provinces,
countries and other continents, and with the people in them. In the exhi-
bitions that followed, rather than following a particular commodity, our
course followed the undulations of the landscape as we continued to
explore these connections with an expanded group of contributors and
collaborators.
As we expanded our orientations, our reflections and inquiries have
followed and contributed to the evolving contours of feminist political
ecology as a way of thinking through and resisting global socio-ecological
injustices. Yet it also feels like the more we have collectively learned, the
harder it is to communicate and maintain a space for learning that is open
across all backgrounds, capacities, positionalities and ontologies. It can
be easy to forget what it was like to not have even heard of ‘extractivism’
or ‘feminist political ecology’, and we have become aware that we have
developed our own vocabulary between us over the years, which perhaps
makes it more difficult to communicate in everyday language or ideas.
Reflecting together, we see how the questions and messages of the exhi-
bitions have evolved, but connecting these into something that feels like
a stable ‘mode of inquiry’ can be challenging.
Alice: I think we (I) felt somewhat reluctant to offer up our own defi-
nitions as we wanted to keep alive the sense of collective inquiry with
our contributors, communities and audiences. Yet as curators we have a
responsibility to offer up useful explanations and guiding ideas.
The feminist impetus to avoid controlling, channelling and containing
the flow of the narrative has always been important, and this means that
while some of our learning is collective, it is also embodied and situated,
sedimented in various ways among us. Here, we share some learnings
from the process of making unexpected connections between the works
that feature in the exhibition series.
Mai: My own contribution ‘Between the frontier spaces’ has many
resonances with ‘Between the rivers’ by Daniel Macmillen Voskoboynik,
both reflecting on rivers. Daniel describes his family home in Russia, and
the kindness of the river, which changes gradually as the landscape is
impacted by extractivism. ‘We lost our footing to the earth, but we never
knew it,’ he writes. Daniel describes one of the characteristics of extrac-
tivism that makes what was originally meaningful and sacred become
cheap and meaningless:
68 A. OWEN ET AL.
This vision—also known as extractivism—enforces a misunderstanding.

Life, which is sacred, is actually cheap, and valuable only in its service
to the economy. What matters and what being means are not ongoing
questions, but simple equations.
Similarly, I find a contradiction in my work between a photo of rusty

tools left by a logging company in heavily damaged and deforested land
now being mined by coal companies, and the continuation of rubber
and fruit orchards providing economic, social and ecological benefits. The
contradiction I describe in the form of a poem:
When the forest, no longer with trees,

Abandoned wreckage machine
and the logging company left
While the orchard is evergreen,

Stocking for harvest every season,
and the rubber dripping sap every day
Like Daniel, I understand that extractivism is not a sectoral project

but a perspective and way of operating: with a large-scale, predatory
character. The predation of extractivism is short, making the sustainable
and the sacred worthless, no longer usable or requiring a long time to
heal. Extractivism is in stark contrast to daily activities such as gardening,
planting, and performing rituals that become the daily routine of Murung
Indigenous people, the face of ‘Despite Extractivism’.
Becky: I had an academic understanding of extractivism and
approached this from a feminist political ecology framing, which empha-
sised research that was designed around words: texts and conversations,
albeit those trying to centre perspectives from communities, and focusing
on everyday livelihoods. I had spent much of my FPE life in ethnographic
fieldwork, aiming to deploy a feminist sensitivity. Engaging with artists
and creatives, I learned the value of seeing the different registers through
which communities tell their stories, and through which others tell the
stories of communities, through art, creativity, song, performance. What
was striking for me was how specific and yet universal some of these
practices were: from the connections to poetry, song and place-making
in the Sperrin Mountains in the North of Ireland (V’cenza Cirefice)
to the ways in which indigenous Waoroni women chanted their histo-
ries of connection to their home territories, in the face of, and despite
violent extractivisms in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Margherita Scazza).

Extracting Us coincided with an amplification of decolonial and anti-
colonial thought and action, and with the centring of ‘extractivism’ as a
concept in political ecology. The Extracting Us collective provided a space
in which to explore the connections between coloniality and extractivism.
Alice: The exhibitions and events helped me understand the perva-
siveness of the violent logics of extractivism, be this through large scale
devastation of landscapes and the direct loss of life and livelihoods, or
through the onto-logics of extractivism which deny other ways of being
in and relating to the world.
Working on the website or the Extracting Us online exhibition
required me to spend time with the works in a deep and focused way. This
was really influential and inspirational to some of the work I presented,
not to mention ongoing thinking about extractivism. I was particularly
influenced by V’cenza Cirefice’s video overlay showing the submerged
perspective of a river flowing through the Sperrin Mountains in the North
of Ireland, and the same area represented from the disembodied perspec-
tive of a map which abstracts living, flowing connections and, through
the ‘Extractive Gaze’ (Gómez-Barris, 2017) sees the land as a resource.
One idea we discussed while curating the exhibition was how extrac-
tivism(s) are not all pervasive. Sometimes defining something can make
it seem bigger than it is, but it is also important to explore how there
are many alternatives to extractivism already in existence. As we explored
in our events and conversations, solidarity and resistance can also occur
across multiple, intersecting scales.
Elona: Being part of the collective introduced me to the notion of
extractivism and allowed me to develop more connections with femi-
nist political ecology scholars and thinking. It allowed me to also see my
work on urban commoning in a different way: making a link between the
extractive processes of capitalism in relation to urban space and practices
of enclosure.
Dian: The curation process shifted my understanding from avoiding
being extractive, towards being care-full. Extractivism was to be avoided
not only in terms of extractive methodologies in our research work, but
also in practices. I was convinced not to do fieldwork during the pandemic
as the field would be the oil palm community residing in places with little
to no access to healthcare.
Mai: As a collective that grew up in the FPE space, we have also
grown and become more sensitive to understanding extractivism, which
70 A. OWEN ET AL.
transfers not only material but also the resistance to it. Resistance exists
in forms not often recognised as resistance, such as in the unseen work
done mostly by women of collecting water, gardening, keeping rituals
before the harvest or meeting with mothers affected by the coal mine.
This care work is extracted under the operation of mining, logging and
other extractive projects. We are starting to learn something new, some-
thing about spaces of care as a way to look at and understand resistance
in the extractive landscape.
Becky: The shift towards Despite Extractivism felt like a point where
the collective moved from wielding a hatchet to sowing seeds (to use
a political ecology metaphor) or at least, tending what was emerging
through the cracks, where I felt our learning moved towards a focus on
extraACTIVISMS (Willow, 2018). This has carried over into other areas
of my work, principally my political ecology pedagogy where different
knowledges and prefigurative politics now feature. Now, I feel an ethical
imperative not only to point to what’s wrong, but to share and learn
where alternatives (not false solutions) are being practised, however
small and mundane, and to see everyday creative practice as a valuable
methodology.
We have ‘looked differently’ at extractivism from many angles, in many
ways and at different scales, thinking alongside creative interventions of
various kinds. This has helped us recognise how extraction/extractivism
has uneven impacts, and to appreciate what is at the core of ‘extractivism’:
the coloniality of its logics.
Moving Forward---Weaving,
Thinking, Caring, Acting
From differently positioned researchers with shared interests to a curato-
rial collective, the Extracting Us journey has been at once an experiment
in feminist political ecology as praxis, and in ‘the exhibition’ as an itera-
tive space for co-inquiry and public engagement on the less explored or
otherwise unconnected aspects and contexts of extractivism.
We have journeyed together with each other, the many contributors,
and the communities and individuals who have shared their experiences
along the way, all giving and gleaning differently from this project and
coming to pause on different riverbanks rather than simply going with the
flow. We have found spaces to stay with our troubles, from the personal
to planetary, with Extracting Us providing something of an anchor in
ever-more turbulent times. Our motivations, understandings, and posi-

tionalities within structures of power and privilege will always situate us
differently in relation to extractivism, but we share a sense that it is a
privilege to have had the opportunity and the collective energy to curate
these exhibitions.
As our river flows towards the sea, we are confronted with multiple
ways in which extractivism in its many registers is re-inscribed, its
logics becoming more pervasive. Extractivism intersects with the rising
tides of patriarchy, authoritarianism, violence, racism and oppression.
How to continue this project of understanding extractivism in a way
which weaves connections between contexts, allows for care-full response-
abilities towards active solidarity and expands the ‘we’ in ways that do
not flatten difference will certainly be troubles we will have to stay
with. Whether through academic, artistic or activist work, or work that
continues to erode the boundaries between these, more creativity will be
needed.
Creativity, communities and care have orientated our co-curation
process, from the ways we work together to the ways we work towards
amplifying, connecting and learning with communities impacted by
extractivism and the artists, academics and researchers who work with
them. Through these experiences and the stories shared in the exhibition
contributions, our thoughts converge on the idea that extractivism is a
violent and pervasive way of enacting force that dismantles human and
more-than-human communities and the relationships of care that exist
within them. Yet. Is this the end of the story? How do communities—be
these communities of place, communities of practice or communities of
solidarity—continue to find different registers through which to question,
subvert, resist, persist and care? How best can we continue to create and
curate creative and care-full spaces across boundaries?
72 A. OWEN ET AL.
References
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holder.
CHAPTER 4
Ouch! Eew! Blech! A Trialogue on Porous

Technologies, Places and Embodiments
Ilenia Iengo, Panagiota Kotsila, and Ingrid L. Nelson
Introduction
What kind of narratives and experiences sit at the margins of feminist
political ecology (FPE) analyses of health, embodiment and environment?
Ilenia, Panagiota and Ingrid started their trialogue as scholars and activists
from different backgrounds and relations interested in this question. In
this chapter, the stories we share are as much part of our fieldwork notes
I. Iengo (B) · P. Kotsila

Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: ilenia.iengo@uab.cat
P. Kotsila
e-mail: panagiota.kotsila@uab.cat
I. L. Nelson
Department of Geography and Geosciences, University of Vermont, Burlington,
VT, USA
e-mail: ilnelson@uvm.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_4
76 I. IENGO ET AL.
as part of our personal diaries. These experiences transform how we do

research, at the same time transforming us. What ties them together is our
attention to the relationship between embodiment and environment. We
come together thus to discuss the politics of making and remaking health
in relation to socio-environmental processes, through the concept of
porosity and the realm of technologies. For us, feminist political ecology
is a convening space for thinking with the trouble in discourses and prac-
tices around health: from the biomedical sciences’ gaze and the relational
ecology between bodies and places, vis-a-vis the biopolitics of the nation-
state to the far from innocent but complex role of both medical and digital
technologies in navigating illness.
Recognising that there is ample feminist academic and activist work
actively engaging with the concept of embodiment and with the gendered
politics of health and medicine, we are particularly interested in how such
work can infuse current thinking and activism on social and environmental
health and technologies. We are not driven by a “gap” in literature,
but rather by our own situatedness in and response-ability towards the
embodied experiences of chronic pain, infection and nausea, and how
these can inform non-normative experiences and knowledges surrounding
health. We borrow the term response-ability from Donna Haraway, as in
“proposing together something unanticipated” (Haraway, 2016, p. 130),
starting from experiences, theories and epistemologies rarely depicted in
the context of FPE and health.
We understand bodies as ecologies, not separated by what happens
“outside our skin”, but as the interconnected system of life within and
beyond our bodies and the economic, racial, gendered, biophysical places
we inhabit (Guthman, 2011; Guthman & Mansfield, 2013). Under-
standing embodied ecologies as relational allows us to see the boundary
marked by the skin as connecting, instead of separating, our bodies and
our environments (Iengo, 2022; Jackson & Neely, 2015). In this chapter
we will reflect on “porosity”, as the relational ecology between bodies and
environments, departing from the ambivalent experiences of such rela-
tions, mediated by medical and digital technologies, as well as gender,
race, and disability. We draw together theory and insights from critical
disability studies, science, technology and society studies (STS), envi-
ronmental justice, and political ecologies of the body and of health, to
produce powerful elaborations that help queer and crip the binary divi-
sion between bodies and places, against “the fantasy of self-contained
wholeness” (Sadler, 2017). This does not negate the politics of bodily
4 OUCH! EEW! BLECH! A TRIALOGUE ON POROUS … 77
autonomy, but rather complexifies them by amplifying the demands

for self-determination and reparation by BIPOC, working-class people,
women, LGBTQIA+ and other marginalised subjectivities in response to
the literal embodiments of differentiated and historically contextualised
oppressions.1
Eco-crip theories constitute a fertile space from which FPE may learn
to cast a light on the non-innocent acts and technologies of “seeing”
which affect what counts as nature and natural (Jaquette Ray & Sibara,
2017). Such seeing questions and reinvents the ideologies of pureness
and desirability for an “elsewhere” and “out there” to be controlled and
tamed. And this reinvention influences power-laden notions of desirability
and purity within human communities. In the encounter between feminist
technoscience and crip studies, we learn about the nuanced and ambiva-
lent entanglements of health, embodiment and technologies (Bailey &
Peoples, 2017; Kafer, 2013; Mingus, 2010).
We weave together three stories from Italy, Greece and the United
States to point to the tensions that emerge when environmental ethics
and discourses do not take into account the intersectional experiences
and positions of vulnerability that are often located at the deeply political,
intimate and embodied levels.
Ilenia brings in her chronic pain experience as a catalyst to learn about
how environmental injustice is accumulating in bodies and territories. In
her southern Italian hometown, environmental injustice is inescapable.
Grassroots socio-environmental justice activism helped many to politicise
territorial experiences of illness and contamination, to learn the power of
bodies coming together to halt slow violence (Nixon, 2011). In her quest
for environmental justice Ilenia is influenced by the epistemic activism of
crip communities in producing counter-knowledge on contested illnesses
and mutual aid practices.
Panagiota tells the story of the embodied and invisible injus-
tices suffered in romanticised agricultural production of “healthy and
local” food products, through the exploitation, disenfranchisement and
exposure of immigrant farmworkers to infection and ill health. As a
white European academic returning to the olive grove-filled country-
side where she used to spend her summers, the critical analysis of
socio-environmental conflict and inequalities suddenly “hit home”. She
1 See Michelle Murphy’s important intervention in these discussions in her 2017 article,
‘What Can’t a Body Do’.
78 I. IENGO ET AL.
observed the patterns of change and inequality in local agriculture, social

fabric, labour conditions and health outcomes in the context of neoliberal
austerity-ridden Greece.
Ingrid speaks of the ambivalent position of pregnant people depending
on two technologies: big pharma-produced medication used in order to
be able to deal with nausea and navigate place, and digital social media
platforms as key spaces of solidarity and empowerment in the struggle
to navigate disability and illness. She connects these technologies to the
pedagogical spaces and institutional labour context in Vermont, with their
attendant privileges and inequities.
Bringing together three distinct and distant stories, we point to how
disembodied environmental politics can become exclusive and replicate
injustice by showing the commonalities that emerge from embodied and
situated perspectives of engaging with ecologies, places, technologies and
health experiences.
This chapter brought us together as FPE scholars involved in the
WEGO network and engaged in health, environmental justice and
embodiment from different perspectives and angles, to engage in a
process of knowledge production which happened via multiple digital
encounters we held over two years, much of which was during the global
COVID-19 pandemic. We started by sharing three stories that relate to
these themes, and stem from our positionalities as scholars and activists
in FPE. The process moved to a phase of “trialogue”, inspired by Costa
et al. (2015) that came out of a set of questions we asked each other in
an effort to trace common and uncommon threads in our stories. What
we share is a leitmotif of bodily ecologies of health, as well as the knowl-
edge and discourses around them, being shaped both politically, through
power, and culturally, through meaning.
Bodily Ecologies and the Embodied

Politics of Visibility
Chronic Pain
In the summer of 2018, after 20 years of normalised pain and medical

gaslighting, I received the diagnosis of endometriosis. I was officially on
holiday, but the reality was that I spent days curled up in bed unable to
move or talk because of the pulling, stabbing and twisting pain across my
abdomen, lower back, and legs. As it happened cyclically, it was time to

search again online for a gynaecologist and hope to get to the source of
my pain. The ultrasound showed an endometrioma, an endometriosis cyst
encapsulating the right ovary, strangely unseen until then. The gynaecolo-
gist explained there was nothing to worry about, instead there were plenty
of options ahead, especially one. He turned to my partner and with cama-
raderie and a condescending tone exclaimed: “I recommend you go home
and engage in ‘you know what I mean’” openly advising sexual inter-
course and pregnancy as a pleasurable (for my male partner) cure (for my
gendered body).
—Ilenia Iengo, personal notes
Ilenia: What time is it? How long have I been here? I often ask myself
while tuning in and out from sleep, without rest, gazing at the walls
of my bedroom. There is no linearity in time when a body experiences
endometriosis, adenomyosis and fibromyalgia. Some call this coexisting,
expanding, retracting, embodied, relational and reclaimed temporality
“crip time”. Alison Kafer helps us reflect on the queer genealogies of crip
time not only as an accommodation for disabled bodies and minds but
as “a challenge to normative and normalizing expectations of pace and
scheduling” (Kafer, 2013, p. 27). Chronic inflammation is the common
thread connecting the multiple illnesses that persist within my body and
the symptom of the past, present and intergenerational damage occurring
to the land. I grew up in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, a geologi-
cally fiery territory nowadays called by local activists “The Land of Fires”
due to the burning and spewing of toxic waste in dumps and landfills,
in the southern Italian region of Campania. A few years ago, I discov-
ered I have deep infiltrating endometriosis, a chronic inflammatory disease
embodying the slow violence of Italian capitalist development and biocide
(Iengo, 2022). During gestation and growth, toxic substances like dioxins
and PCBs have soaked my territory in Southern Italy and crossed the
porous boundary between the inside and the outside, they enveloped the
bowels of my body in adhesions and endometriosis lesions fuelling the
ever-growing familiar pain (Iengo, 2022).
Starting from the experience of chronic illness, where the intersection
of gender, environmental, class and racial violence produce a complex
system of oppression, I present some instances of situated strategies to
reclaim our spaces, knowledge, voices and desires as disabled and chroni-
cally ill people in socio-environmental justice movements, while working
80 I. IENGO ET AL.
towards cripping and queering the political relationship between health

and environment.
The contaminated body is the terrain for subjectification and politici-
sation of everyday life (Iengo & Armiero, 2017). Environmental injustice
and exploitation accumulate in marginalised bodies which are contami-
nated twice: first by the toxic substances occupying their neighbourhoods
and lives, second by the toxic narratives which silence this injustice, invis-
ibilise the sick bodies, and blame those who live with the consequences
of contamination (Barca, 2014). Our communities and territories are
considered expendable for the profit and well-being of others; there-
fore, we fall ill, reflecting the poor health of our neighbourhoods and
cities. We get sick and, contrary to the dominant narrative, it is not our
fault, nor the consequences of our lifestyles and choices. Some of us
may live with chronic illness and disability as a consequence of disabling
social and economic environments (Hedva, 2018). The lived experience
of disability or chronic illness is confronted with the ableism of a system
that classifies us as unworthy and unproductive. We are discarded at every
turn of life due to the societally compulsory able-bodiedness and able-
mindedness (Kafer, 2003; McRuer, 2002). Such narratives of obliteration,
undesirability and aberration to be fixed are inherent even in the prefigu-
rations of radical socio-environmental futures, where chronically ill and
disabled bodies are often not contemplated, reproducing our absence
(Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). The disability justice movement overturns
the narrative: disabled and chronically ill people take the floor and do
the fundamental work of constructing imaginaries and practices of socio-
environmental indispensability (Pellow, 2018) to dismantle ableist ideas
according to which chronic illness and disability are merely medical condi-
tions while the material evidence of social and environmental injustice is
erased (Kim, 2017). In this intervention, I recollect some of the thoughts,
worries, feelings and developments of an ecotransfeminist exploration and
expansion of a cripistemology of pain (Patsavas, 2014) together with the
emergence of disabled and chronically ill folks’ epistemic activism wherein
we speak for ourselves (Hamraie, 2012).
I often wonder what would have become of this experience if I didn’t
have the lens of transfeminism to help me recognise that there was
nothing normal or acceptable in being belittled when I came to the ER
unable to move or speak out of pain, in the physician’s suggestions of
pregnancy as cure, or in the 22 years of diagnostic delay. Diagnosis is
a fundamental tool in the path of chronic illness and is often linked
to conflicting feelings of validation and discouragement. These feelings

express the contradictory, yet impossible to disentangle, tension between
the pathologisation that comes with diagnosis and the legitimation of pain
to access support systems. This objective tool of biomedical science, a
non-neutral field of knowledge with its eugenic, ableist, racist, misogynist,
transphobic and industrial-military-complex roots, holds immense power
to shape how the world sees and categorises us and our chaotic embod-
iment (Clare, 2009; Jaquette Ray & Sibara, 2017; Kafer, 2013; Lorde,
1980).
In recent years, with the composite transfeminist community in Italy,
we are elaborating intersectional perspectives on health to include the
gendered experiences of disabled and chronically ill folks. Through the
feminist practice of self-awareness, we have learned to recognise the struc-
tural violence of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, self-awareness among
chronically ill and disabled people helps us to highlight how ableism is
at the basis of capitalist, productivist and patriarchal society imposing
the standard of productivity upon us that we ourselves have often
metabolised. In the autumn of 2021, with the transfeminist network Non
una di meno (NUDM) we began to reflect on our embodied experi-
ences of patriarchal medicine and the multiple “invisible” and gendered
illnesses. I prefer to use the term invisibilised, because even if some
illnesses do not necessarily leave visible marks on the body, if one pays
close attention to these lives, it all becomes very evident. On October 23,
2021, under the slogan “sensible-invisibile”, we took our aching bodies
to public space in about 20 Italian cities to share the experiences of people
with endometriosis, adenomyosis, vulvodynia, fibromyalgia and pudendal
neuropathy. We have organised online national and city-wide assemblies
for the construction of a presidio to amplify the voices of those who
live with these diseases, denouncing the misrecognition and disinterest of
the national health care system. In the spirit of self-organised knowledge
production, we produced and distributed leaflets with self-help tips, basic
information concerning the different illnesses and banners explaining that
experiencing pain is not normal and should not be normalised (Jones,
2016). Gendered illnesses reflect social taboos inasmuch as medicine
reflects patriarchal oppressions, leading to the social, economic, psycho-
logical, health and environmental consequences borne individually by the
sick person. In Naples, we gathered in a square with chairs and benches
for everyone to rest and participate, where we shared our stories, hung
posters where we imprinted the medical violence we have suffered, the
82 I. IENGO ET AL.
desires that keep us going and reclaimed our experiences beyond the
tragic and pitiful narrative, instead politicising disability and chronic illness
as the complex and powerful experience, a place of knowledge production
to be collectivised.
For the first time in the feminist movement in Italy, we are expanding
the historical framework focused on reproductive health and abortion to
include the needs and desires of our chronically ill and disabled bodies
(Price, 2015). To express the anger that inflames our transfeminist polit-
ical action is a form of healing from the accumulated trauma and violence
(Hedva, 2018). The path for an ecotransfeminism that recognises and
fights against ableism as one of the forms of oppression of white and colo-
nial supremacist capitalism is a battle where no one is excluded and where
the issues of mutual care, anti-sexism, interdependence, anti-racism, sex
work, environmental and social justice can produce powerful alliances to
dismantle the master’s house. In line with this practice, it is essential that
disabled and chronically ill people speak out in ecological and transfemi-
nist battles to broaden the voice of those who defend the earth and the
living. We know how important it is to free care work from feminisa-
tion through collectivisation, in order to affirm all the different forms of
what we mean by and desire about health and reciprocity. Through this
process we can make the spaces of militancy and struggles more inclu-
sive for everyone. This is the challenge against a world that portrays us as
passive and silent victims if not unproductive and unworthy lives.
Infection
“Be careful when you go down there, it’s dangerous, don’t wear short
pants” –This was the friendly advice of a woman representing the company
in charge of mosquito control in the region of Skala, Greece, where
malaria had taken hold during the years 2009–2015. At first, I thought
her comment was referring to avoiding getting bitten by mosquitoes in
the orange fields I was going to visit. Moments later, I realised she
was referring to protecting myself from male farmworkers from Pakistan
and Bangladesh. Reproducing racist and colonial imaginations of dark-
skinned people as hypersexual, uncivilised, and savage, this pretension of
woman-to-woman solidarity made my stomach turn.
—Panagiota Kotsila, personal notes
Panagiota: “Farmers here used to gamble their cars and houses during
the ‘good times,’ in the casinos. A lot of fortunes made and lost down
there, all from the oranges”, my father said as we were sipping coffee at
the porch of the house where he grew up, at a village near Sparta, Greece.
It was 2015 and he had not yet heard about the rise of malaria cases in this
region since 2009, which remarkably coincided with the beginning of the
economic downturn and what would be a long period of crisis-induced
austerity. He was also unclear about why I was visiting the town of Skala,
in the agricultural plain of the Evrotas River Delta, an hour and a half
drive away—to research land change and agricultural practices, mosquito
ecologies, or the living conditions of immigrant farmworkers? Here too,
microbes, mosquitoes, oranges, land, immigrants, bodies, farmers, polit-
ical economy, and public health “are all part of a single story” (Mansfield,
2011).
My family used to own orange trees in the region. Now we only have
some olive trees, as they demand less water and attention. “Olives are
sacred”, my grandma used to say. She became a widow only a year after
she was disinherited by her family for falling in love with my grandpa. She
used to collect wild oregano and mountain tea as a source of income to
raise her only son. Since my father moved to Athens, the management of
the fields is delegated to a local family who in turn hires farmworkers to
complete the harvest every winter, getting in return half of the resulting
organic, cold-pressed olive oil from the local cooperative. I seem to come
from a line of local producers in the region, of hard-working people
working the land, of a single mother who struggled to survive.
About two weeks before, I was sitting across the desk of a public
health worker in the Hellenic Center for Diseases Control and Preven-
tion, back in Athens. She was rather confidently describing the success
of the anti-malaria program in the Evrotas region, through door-to-door
visits, body temperature monitoring, drug administration, distribution of
bed nets and anti-mosquito plug-ins to the farmworkers living in the
fields. At my mention of the deep discriminatory structures and obstacles
that immigrant farmworkers face in Greece, she resorted to self-defensive
claims: “We tell the farmers to protect their (sic) immigrants, to give them
anti-mosquito appliances and take them to the doctor”. I seem to come
from a society where the dehumanisation of immigrant subjects is deeply
ingrained.
A month later in early August, I was walking around the orange fields
in Skala, looking for the shacks and half-finished constructions where
84 I. IENGO ET AL.
immigrant farm workers lived. As a river delta, the Evrotas region is fertile
and supports a vast cultivation of oranges and other agricultural goods.
The seaside swamps, lagoons and sandy beaches, coupled with an expan-
sive network of irrigation canals, make the region also a prime location for
the Anopheles mosquito, a carrier of malaria. Since the late 1990s, male
migrants mostly from Pakistan and Afghanistan work in these fields. Some
800–1,000 workers reside there permanently while others only come for
the harvesting season. In 2010, the number of immigrants in the region
peaked at 1,500, with most of them being irregular and risking depor-
tation under an aggressive immigration policy. In 2011, there were 42
domestically acquired malaria cases documented—the highest reported
since 1974.
The first years of rapid malaria spread in the region of Skala (2009–
2011), the issue remained concealed in internal reports of local author-
ities and did not make local news (Kotsila & Kallis, 2019). For the
(government-friendly) media, it only became a story worth telling in
order to cast blame. Enhancing a neoliberal personification of health risks,
vulnerable individuals were presented as the risk themselves, because they
were mostly affected by it. During those years, in a context of severe cuts
in public healthcare and other welfare sectors, immigrants, sex workers
and people with drug addiction were bluntly blamed for the rise of
infectious diseases in Athens (Kotsila & Kallis, 2019).
During the first years of spread, malaria was a non-issue for the national
public health authorities, as it appeared to mostly affect immigrant groups
in the region. But, in 2012, when the number of Greek citizens infected
also started to rise, and the tourism sector was facing the risk of a red
flag from the World Health Organization, it became a reality worth
addressing. Immigrant bodies in Skala were no longer perceived solely
as moving the national “productivity wheel” through their cheap labour,
but also, at the same time, as potentially blocking it. Immigration was
then treated as a disease risk factor, rather than as a site of vulnera-
bility. The biopolitical caring state suddenly “saw” immigrant farmworkers
and targeted them as subjects of public health interventions, including
enforcing preventive medicalisation only for immigrants, often without
their clear consent.
This operated within a broader and historical bio-/necro-politics of
immigration (Foucault, 2003; Mbembe, 2020) through which irregular
immigrants are discursively and practically treated as ambivalent subjects:
a threat to the nation-state’s “well-being”, at the same time necessary as
workers for many of its productive sectors. As such, both a risk and an
asset, they are continually being managed and controlled. The malaria
epidemic exacerbated this process of “an internal racism of permanent
purification” (Foucault, 2003, p. 62) and a “constant exposure to condi-
tions of death” (Mbembe, 2020), by tying already existing xenophobic
attitudes and anxieties to concrete health aspects, as immigrants from
malaria-endemic countries were blamed for introducing the disease to
local environments.
Shirts and pants were drying in the sun on a rope between two trees. I
was sitting outside a shack, strategically hidden among orange trees in the
middle of agricultural land. These houses were as big as 10m2 and shared
by 6–8 workers, and with no glass on the windows to keep mosquitoes
out, still, four years after the malaria outbreak. Some of the men joined me
around the table; others seemed to want nothing to do with a white girl
holding a notebook and asking questions. They told me how they were
not allowed to rent a decent home in the village, how they were owed
salaries, and treated “like animals”, how they were the last to be attended
to in the health centres. “There is no way to protect from the mosquitoes,
but more than getting sick, we are afraid of getting deported”, said one
of the youngest from the group. I doubted whether the older man, who
kept a big stack of painkillers next to his bed, would agree—his body
would not take a malaria infection, or maybe it had already been through
it.
A couple of years ago [2014], doctors came here to make tests and give
us medicine. A couple nights later, the police came together with others.
They beat us, broke our stuff, and arrested some. We couldn’t trust the
doctors again.
I suddenly realised that malaria was not the outcome of rational decisions
about how to better protect from it (wear long clothes, use bed nets,
avoid standing water), or of the politically defined spatial and temporal
coexistence of orange trees, irrigation canals, mosquitoes and people’s
bodies. Similar to what Doshi (2017) has highlighted for urban contexts,
here also it was the embodied, emotional, and visceral realities of state
violence, social exclusion and fear that pushed farmworkers to live in
the fields and avoid public health authorities, tests and medical visits,
even if it meant that the epidemic from which they were also suffering
86 I. IENGO ET AL.
would be harder to control. In Skala, just as in most contexts of inten-

sive agricultural production of high-value (mono)crops, immigrant farm
workers often lack legal recognition and live precariously from one season
to the next. They are not considered part of the population socially or
politically—they provide labour but have very limited (labour, health,
civil) rights (Agamben, 1998). While targeted public health interven-
tions might have helped fight malaria, they did not question the broader
structures of racial capitalism and enduring colonial ideologies that had
been shaping immigrants’ livelihoods and health for years in Skala, and
beyond.2
I had spent countless summers in rural Peloponnese, but home for me
is the urban centre of Athens, where I lived and studied for most of my
life. During my fieldwork, I was a local, but I also was not. Living abroad
for seven years, I even felt disconnected from the reality of the deep
economic crisis in Greece at the time. I was also a migrant, but one well
shielded behind white skin, a European passport, and highly respected
institutions. It was these felt “ambivalences, discomfort, tensions and
instabilities of subjective positions” (Sultana, 2007, p. 377) that pushed
me to tell this story about the margins of recognition, citizenship and
belonging. It is there where I found the hands that pick, the bodies that
bend, and the faces that—after days of listening and engaging with their
stories—smiled back to me.
Nausea
“So that’s the process of the whole Zofran pump…I’m in the military
so, I had to figure out how I’m going to carry this pump around…”
A vlogger explained via vlog how she experienced Hyperemesis Gravi-
darum (HG) and how she connected her Zofran pump3 to her pregnant
2 Neely (2021) speaks of this in the context of health development programs in the
global South. Here, we see one way in which these relationships are reproduced in the
context of enduring colonial ideologies in Europe.
3 A ‘Zofran pump’ refers informally to a subcutaneous (SQ) micropump device for
infusing controlled doses of a medication (in this case Ondansetron, which is commonly
sold under the brand name Zofran), which ensures faster uptake of the medicine than
oral modes of delivery (especially when a person is unable to tolerate swallowing much
of anything), while allowing a person greater mobility and independence than with larger,
intravenous treatments.
belly and carried it with her in uniform at her workplace. I watched her
vlog among many others on YouTube several times and read through the
comments of hundreds of others struggling with HG. Both HG vlogs
and Zofran were life-altering technologies carrying me through my preg-
nancy with HG. They exist through corporate infrastructures mediating
everyday social relations, and they enabled me to leave my bed to continue
teaching undergraduate students and to bring my pregnancy to full term.
This uneasy reliance on serotonin 5-HT3 receptor antagonist drugs and
social media voyeurism pushed me to empathize beyond my own embodied
experiences and to confront my own ableist understanding of various
technologies as an early career feminist political ecologist.
—Ingrid Nelson, personal notes
Ingrid: It is uncomfortable for me to admit that both the drug Zofran

and watching hours of HG vlogs helped me to leave my bed, carry my
pregnancy to term and keep my job. While data on HG is woefully rare
and unevenly gathered, the Hyperemesis Education & Research (HER)
Foundation4 estimates a “fetal loss rate” of 34%, and more than half
of those with HG experience job loss. I understand these drug and
social media social technologies on which I relied with thankfulness,
ambivalence and as troubling, augmentative and largely unseen in many
discussions of pregnancy in my personal and academic settings.
I spent the fall season of 2017 bed-bound with hyperemesis gravidarum
(HG) until my insurance provider finally approved the off-label use of
Ondansetron (commonly known and sold as Zofran), to enable me to eat
again, and to leave my bed to continue to teach undergraduate students.
I had lost twenty pounds in my first trimester, was vomiting between
ten and twenty times per day and nearly required hospitalisation due
to dehydration. Hoping to avoid the occasional foetal heart complica-
tions that can occur with taking Ondansetron in the first trimester, my
obstetricians initially dismissed my symptoms as me being too wimpy to
handle common morning sickness. As a member of my faculty union in
the context of the United States, where access to health care is not yet a
right, I was privileged to access health care benefits in my union contract
that paid a large portion—though not all—of the cost of my medical care.
I tried anti-nausea wrist bands, an expensive new drug called Diclegis, and
4 https://www.hyperemesis.org/about-hyperemesis-gravidarum/.
88 I. IENGO ET AL.
attempted to follow any advice I could find in general pregnancy infor-

mation materials in books and online to no avail. I remember staring at
the bottle of Zofran pills before gratefully taking my first dose, which
also triggered intense memories of helping my mother keep track of all of
her pills—including her Zofran—during her radiation and chemotherapy
treatments for cervical cancer when I was a teenager. She fought hard
to access this expensive serotonin 5-HT3 receptor antagonist.5 It blocks
the working of serotonin in the part of the brain stem responsible for
the involuntary vomiting reflex. I remembered my parents arguing about
how disgustingly expensive treating cancer can be.6
Before swallowing Ondansetron, I was too weak to do much of
anything, including watching online videos or engaging with social media.
I had to teach two days per week. My partner drove me to my first class,
where I sat and drew diagrams and key terms on a “doccam” projected
onto a screen; I couldn’t stand and write on the board. I then made
my way to my office where I slept on the floor until I had to go to my
next class, an advanced FPE seminar in which students co-designed and
co-led discussions centring our readings for the day. My partner would
then pick me up and I would remain in bed—with the exception of bath-
room visits or being driven to the obstetrician’s office—until the last day
of classes for the week. Ondansetron made it possible for me to move
about in a campus landscape that I otherwise could no longer access due
to weakness, dehydration, sudden weight loss, and nausea. Even with this
drug, I still vomited most days, just less often. I wasn’t able to eat a
“full” meal until after giving birth. Once I had the drug, I also mustered
enough energy to at least resume more active teaching. I also started to
engage more with social media where I found vloggers who described
their experiences with HG.
Most HG vloggers were careful to provide disclaimers that they were
“not a doctor” and encouraged viewers to seek professional medical
advice if they suspected they might have HG, even as most complained
about their doctors not believing them for an unacceptable period of
time. Many themes emerged in the vlogs, such as how to distinguish
5 In 1998, her bottle of ondansetron cost nearly US$ 1,200.00. Generic versions only
became available in 2007.
6 I deeply appreciate S. Lochlann Jain’s 2015 critical analysis of the cancer industrial
complex, a book I have taught in an undergraduate seminar four times with profound
impacts, as expressed in various student feedback.
between morning sickness and HG, which results in drastic weight loss
and dehydration and does not respond to morning sickness support
measures. Others demonstrated how to set up and attach Zofran pumps
and others narrated their experience while hooked up to IV lines in
hospital beds. Several vloggers addressed losing a pregnancy or resorting
to abortion while others addressed finding support to care for toddlers
while experiencing HG. Many spoke of financial hardship, job loss and
challenges with partners or others in “support” networks who dismissed
the severity of their symptoms. These vlogs broadened my understanding
of HG across age, race, class, sexuality and other categories. Here, those
whose complaints are especially disregarded by medical practitioners,
such as women of colour and queer women, wait longer for diagnosis
and to receive treatment, if they do. Those without childcare support
and who cannot afford time away from work during pregnancy also
struggle, centring class and caregiving contexts as critical. There were
major differences across class, childcare and work contexts in terms of
who experienced job loss or lost the ability to care for their children while
pregnant. They also demonstrated the range of severity of symptoms,
with some women being hospitalised for long periods, others relying on
portable Zofran pumps and others managing with pills while still others
experienced resistance to most anti-emetic drugs.
Media studies scholar, Samira Rajabi (2021, pp. 70–71), argues, “The
Internet, particularly in the case of traumatic suffering, has been shown
to take passive sufferers and enable them to make themselves into active
media prosumers, engendering new points of significance and fostering
the potential for change…whether the trauma was from experiencing,
looking, or feeling empathy, the process of meaning making functioned
in the same way”, in the context of a woman’s viral breast cancer photo
story created by her husband. The HG vlogs strengthened my empathy
for others with HG while providing me with context and thankfulness
that my Zofran pills were working enough to keep me out of the hospital
while not necessitating a pump or other additional support. This broader
perspective also made various remarks by my obstetricians about how I
shared something with select celebrities all the more infuriating. Unlike
attempting to find experiential connections between myself and a famous
person, viewing multiple HG vlogs highlighted illness as always situ-
ated in a social, place-based and political-economic context. The vlogs
highlighted the essential roles of family and other caregivers, insurance
companies and everyday mundane practices shaping experiences of HG.
90 I. IENGO ET AL.
Many vlogs “disappear” over time or are hard to locate long after they
go online. At the same time, other digital presences persist beyond when
a vlogger might want them to. HG is both temporary (for the duration of
a pregnancy) but also lingers in the sense that since having my daughter I
have refused to become pregnant again. Every mention of a second child
and the joys that a sibling might bring to my daughter provoke a visceral
reaction in my body—never again will I go through that experience, espe-
cially knowing that HG is quite likely and often increases in severity with
every pregnancy. Some people develop resistance to the drugs. I just can’t
imagine myself enduring a pregnancy without the drugs that allowed me
to eat instead of wasting away in the hospital, this time with a young
child to care for. Some with HG decide to have more children, especially
if they feel supported and if they know they can access the drugs they
need. I would likely need to take unpaid medical leave and that seems
unaffordable. Some of my Angolan partner’s extended family see me as
a failure for not having many more children. The accusations amount to,
“See what you get for choosing a white wife!” when really in this case this
is “what you get” with someone who gets HG. Or maybe I wouldn’t get
HG a second time around, but the odds are not good. There is a complex
temporality to these kinds of calculations.
In the case of HG, temporality also complicates the building of virtual
communities and notions of crip identity politics. Many who experience
HG can “move on” after their experience because HG has an end (the
end of pregnancy). Within 3 hours of giving birth, I ate my first full
meal: a greasy grilled cheese sandwich. Although it gave me some tempo-
rary heartburn, the speed with which my body shifted from an aversion
to most food (even with the drug) to no more nausea was striking. Three
hours! Within the next week, I became ravenous as my body suddenly
transitioned into needing to produce breast milk while also gaining back
all the weight I had lost during my pregnancy (the opposite situation for
many). While there are some who take on HG as a cause to support and
to build community around supporting others. This can also get infused
with challenging abortion rights politics. Some anti-abortion activists see
HG as an instance where they can actively coach pregnant people away
from abortion. The majority of vlogs I encountered avoided questions
of abortion or framed it as something for the pregnant person and their
doctor to work through. There is a plethora of community and activism
in these digital spaces, but I wouldn’t call it all good activism or feminist.
Regarding HG activism and temporality, for how long does “response-

ability” apply? With whom are we in community, for how long and why?
Are short-lived communities of care and activism also laudable? Femi-
nist? What happens to an issue/disease/experience as something worth
organising around, if it’s not “chronic” (although it is likely to repeat
when pregnant again), and thus, not easy or obvious to build an identity
around?
Discussion
Porosity and the Symptoms of Relational Ecologies
How do these stories speak to the porous, inextricable relationships
between bodies and places; bodies and territories?
Chronic pain is a symptom of the porous relationship between body
and place, even though it is often silenced in the biomedical sciences.
For Ilenia, the embodied and everyday experience of pain sparked the
desire to learn from the composite history of struggles for social and
environmental justice animated by Black, Latinx, Indigenous and prole-
tarian women and LGBTQIA+ folks (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002; Kafer,
2013; Lorde, 1980; Pulido, 2008). Their activism employs the politicisa-
tion of ill bodies (Iengo & Armiero, 2017) as a peculiar kind of situated
knowledge reflecting on how the health conditions of a community have
much more to do with the accumulation of institutionalised oppression
and toxicity than with a personal fault or incapacity (Iengo, 2022). It
took years of days filled with pain, sometimes normalised, or at best met
by a sense of pity by a myriad of medical doctors, teachers, friends and
lovers, to come to terms with the relevance of pain in understandings of
intersecting environmental, social, gender oppressions. A cripistemology
of pain contributes to affirming the experiences of pain and the situated,
partial knowledge that stems from such embodiment (Patsavas, 2014).
In situating the experience of chronic pain within the cultural politics of
ableism, a cripistemology of pain criticises the reduction of chronically ill
and disabled people’s lives to body parts that hurt.
Ilenia’s chronic inflammatory pain functioned as an instigator to politi-
cise the porosity of embodiment. In the Land of Fires, it means engaging
with the uneven infrastructure of chemical relations where dioxin bioaccu-
mulates into human and more-than-human bodies as a result of hazardous
waste burning (Iengo, 2022; Murphy, 2017a, 2017b). In this reflection,
92 I. IENGO ET AL.
Ilenia thinks with the proposition by Sara J. Grossman to be attentive

to such relationships of pain and narrative that leak between biospheres
and bodies (2019). FPE needs to make space for the cripping and
queering work around the politics of knowledge reproduction on socio-
environmental health, which go beyond the victim narrative or that of
somewhere/someone deemed unnatural, sick, unproductive and in need
of fixing. FPE has a long history of amplifying autonomous and grass-
roots efforts in producing knowledges that can help us interrogate issues
such as the feminised and sexualised nature of care work which does not
make space or create possibilities for the sick woman. Ilenia proposes
a cross-fertilisation of transfeminism, critical disability studies and envi-
ronmental humanities in fostering perspectives that move beyond the
normative assumptions often found in the biomedical sphere.
Together with comrades and friends, she recalls discussing: What
happens when the body who needs care/to be attended to is the one
naturally charged with the responsibility of care? A short circuit is the
most fitting metaphor, because the entire relational, social, economic
system on which the patriarchal society is based upon is the paid,
underpaid, unpaid, naturalised and unrecognised labour of women and
feminised subjectivities. If the disease keeps her in bed, unable to do
much, who will take care of her, what kind of future can she imagine?
These are the questions that keep her awake at night, when the pains are
not so acute and there is room for thought. There is still a lot we need to
do in our political communities to be able to think and practice response-
ability towards the vulnerability, care and desires of our non-conforming
bodies.
Through a different material experience, in the case of malaria in the
Evrotas River Delta, the disease itself was the outcome of and the polit-
ical ground on which a crisis of biopolitics was articulated and built
(Kotsila & Kallis, 2021). This process illuminated how undesired, but
otherwise “natural” ecologies, such as those of mosquito populations
in wetland environments, become one of the outcomes of state failures
in environmental management and result in disease. At the same time,
these undesired disease vectors also become the place—the pore itself—
of the porous relationships between places and bodies. The fact that
those most exposed and affected by this relationship have been immigrant
farmworkers makes visible the deeply political processes that underlie the
decisions around who, under which conditions and with what conse-
quences, will become entangled with such “undesired” natures. Here,
it is not only how agricultural production will take place and whether
it will be sustainable, organic, and local that matters; it is mainly a
question of agency, ownership, rights and ultimately social and polit-
ical power that defines the condition of agricultural workers and their
everyday experience of enduring both undesired ecologies and status of
undesired/denied citizenship.
Health inequalities are determined socially (Marmot, 2005). Malaria,
specifically, demonstrates the need to examine disease under a more
holistic and critical framework of socio-environmental evolution and
change, as it depends on the intersecting ecologies and geographies of
human, mosquito and water bodies. As Carter (2012, p. 2) has noted in
Argentina: “malaria thrived in the region’s hot, humid, subtropical envi-
ronment but also flourished opportunistically in bodies worn down by
alcoholism, malnutrition, overwork, and material deprivation”.
Immigration itself, in this sense, can be considered a social deter-
minant of health (Castañeda et al., 2015). The recent work of Teresa
Mares (2019) on the dairy industry in Vermont, US, for example, also
points to why occupational health risks and the non-access to health care
impose tremendous challenges for immigrant workers in their efforts to
care for themselves and their dependents. In Skala, too, as Panagiota here
explained, malaria spread not only because immigrants did not have access
to health care, but because they were working in highly mosquito-prone
areas, inhabiting humid orange orchards with irrigation canals, in substan-
dard accommodation and with no access to means of disease prevention.
In turn, this was tightly linked to their status as non-citizens and their
racial and ethnic background. As Carney (2014) notes, intersectional anal-
ysis has to include this experience of “illegality” as an axis of barriers to
resource access and “the embodiment of subordinated status” experienced
by undocumented migrants (citing Quesada et al., 2011, p. 351)”.
It is thus important to think of these everyday embodied reali-
ties of experiencing, inhabiting and becoming in relationship to food
production—and of any process of human–environment interaction and
relation—in order to move away from romanticised visions of places or
processes that might appear idyllic and pure in ecological, and as an exten-
sion, ethical terms. Although in biological terms, the interaction between
bodies and environments are governed by the same biophysical “laws”,
the co-becoming of farm and farmer, of earth and earth-carer, of food
and food producer, is always conditioned upon intersectional identities
and positions of oppression or privilege. We need to speak more of that
in our analysis of socio-environmental realities and future transformations.
94 I. IENGO ET AL.
As Ingrid explains, the aetiology of HG is still largely unknown, but

it is broadly understood as “internal” in cause, rather than the result of
exposure to a chemical such as dioxin or a plasmodium parasite…although
HG occurs only while a person is pregnant (jokes and feminist writing
about foetuses as kinds of parasites abound by the way), and then ceases
within mere hours after the end of a pregnancy. Here, Ingrid sees fruitful
scholarship from thinkers such as Sophie Lewis (2018, 2019) on gesta-
tional justice and the concept of “full surrogacy” as a way to reconfigure
the connections, politics and responsibilities between people’s bodies,
social connections and places. The shift in her hormones also altered her
connections with place through smell. When experiencing HG, her nausea
was easily triggered by both commonly recognised foul odours and by
mundane smells not normally considered illness-inducing. To this day, the
seasonal change to autumn where she lives and works, in Vermont, brings
scents of fermenting apples fallen from trees, a variety of fall flowers and
seasonal foods, which triggers nausea long after having had HG. Autumn
was the time in her pregnancy before her insurance approved Zofran,
when she rapidly lost the most weight and was the least mobile. Her
brain apparently still associates the scents of this season with the worst of
HG for her.
Technologies and the Politics of Visibility

In the case of endometriosis and chronic pain, Ilenia describes her
experience of health-related technologies, or the role of technology in
experiencing and navigating health conditions, which reveals also how
digital technologies can help visibilise and empower in a subversive, eman-
cipatory way. In 2017, she started to search for an online crip community
while her symptoms became unbearable, until she was stuck in the house
or in bed for weeks or months. In an anglophone context, she found
people who told their story, unrecognised by medical staff, others who
provided everyday life hacks and advice for managing symptoms, and
others dedicated to divulging the latest scientific advancements in simple
and accessible language. Where the health professionals had failed in
recognising what was wrong, there were so many people who according
to the feminist practice “hermana yo sì te creo” (“sister I do believe
you”), not only validated symptoms but were filled with anger at how
the medical system treats chronically ill women, BIPOC and non-binary
people, and at the same time offered empathy and support to those who
took the first steps in the community.
Thanks to these online networks, archives of materials to study the

complexity of the disease in depth are made accessible, to help awareness-
building around the possible therapeutic options, against the oppressive
medical myths to be debunked,7 and the rights that we can affirm as
patients. In Italy there is a flourishing of online dissemination and mutual
help between people with endometriosis happening at the grassroots level.
Info.endometriosi8 and chroniqueers9 are online support communities
that divulge expert knowledge and create space for sharing experiences,
hacks, and push the boundaries of what counts as knowledge about
who is the endometriosis patient from an intersectional and transfeminist
perspective.10 Their work uses digital spaces strategically to build commu-
nity, and overflows in spaces of grassroots organising with assemblies and
self-training events.
7 Endometriosis is systemic chronic inflammatory illness where endometrial-like tissue

creates lesions, cysts and nodules, growing its own nerves and blood vessels causing
inflammation, scar tissue, fibrosis and adhesions in extra-uterine context, especially in
the pelvic and abdominal area, although it has been found on all organs of the human
body. However, the vast majority of medical school training still casts endometriosis as a
menstrual issue. For more on the sexist, racist, classist discourses in endometriosis science
see: Capek (2000), Guidone (2020), and Iengo (2022).
8 https://www.instagram.com/infoendometriosi/.
9 http://chroniqueers.it.
10 In the book, “The Makings of a Modern Epidemic: Endometriosis, Gender and
Politics”, author Kate Seear, traces how biomedical science has defined a prototype of
person with endometriosis with complex consequences for those identified and those
invisibilised. For decades, endometriosis was also called “the career woman’s disease”.
Manifested in this definition is the construction of patriarchal, classist and racist medicine
that obliterate BIPOC women and LGBTQIA+ folks. In the 1930s, physician Joe Vincent
Meigs, concerned about declining birth rates in affluent, white communities in the United
States, defined endometriosis as a consequence of prolonged, uninterrupted menstruation.
Drawing parallels with primate females, whose menstruation is a rare occurrence between
pregnancies, he proposed multiple and early pregnancies as a natural condition for female
health. In addition, Meigs spent much energy in advising physicians to encourage their
affluent and white patients to reproduce to overcome the population growth of the
subordinate classes. To date, it is uncommon to hear such blunt arguments, although
the ways in which “the endo patient” is classified and the solutions offered remain the
same. An intersectional analysis allows us to unveil how the assumption that the disease
affected white, upper-class women who choose a career over family came to be imposed,
obliterating and keeping proletarian and racialized women and LGBTQIA+ completely out
of the statistics. It takes an average of 7.5 years to receive a diagnosis. For black, racialized
and LGBTQIA+ people this time is multiplied out of all proportion, and they face greater
difficulties in accessing already risky healthcare, while experiencing more medical violence
in “women’s” wards.
96 I. IENGO ET AL.
Disability justice and crip activism mediated and flourishing via digital
technologies has offered us tools to counter-narrate our own bodily
experiences, against the pathologisation of the body and the patron-
ising practices of the medical establishment, and to navigate anti-ableist
everyday life practices as disabled and chronically ill folks. It is essen-
tial to talk about the transformative power of our crip communities
without indulging in inspirational narratives of the “super crip” focusing
on overcoming illness and achieving well-being in spite of the conditions
(Clare, 2009; Hamilton, 2014; Schalk, 2016). Nobody can determine
what quality of life means to us but us! The mutual aid networks between
spoonies11 have been fundamental for education towards awareness and
improvement of symptoms, while reinventing our material and discursive
worlds (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019).
In the activism of chronically ill and disabled people, the issue of data is
fundamental: where there is no information, it must be collected through
self-organised inquiries and analysed from an intersectional perspective to
fill those gaps in the representation of class, race, gender, nationality, sexu-
ality and of course ability, to raise awareness on the lurking oppressions
and injustices. Some have called the practice of producing this transfor-
mative, creative, knowledge that is specific to the experiences and lives
of chronically ill and disabled people, as “epistemic activism” (Hamraie,
2017, p. 132) in opposition to the dominant forms of knowing and acting
around disability. Expanding the narrative of contested illnesses allows
us to explore together and engage in processes that help recover our
dignity and to overcome mainstream discourses that portray people with
disabilities and chronic illness as expendable. This work, which is often
done via digital technologies, exposes how ability, gender, sexuality, race,
class, nationality influence our experiences of biomedical, economic and
environmental violence, and from there to think about the practices, tech-
nologies and emancipatory imaginaries that we can put in place. These
experiences do not allow a linear and universal prescriptive definition of
11 Spoonie is a concept that refers to the “theory of spoons” used in the world of
chronically ill and disabled people as a metaphor and visual representation of the daily
amount of physical and mental energies that are indispensable for carrying out various
activities. The theory, proposed by Christine Miserandino who lives with lupus, allows
us to simply visualize how each disabled or chronically ill person has a limited number
of spoons per day to deal with various tasks including showering, cooking, leaving the
house, participating in a demonstration, have sex and work.
our political paths, which on the contrary must take into account the
complexity and multiplicity of experiences and desires.
In the case of immigrant farmworkers, as Panagiota explained, taking
care of oneself is often synonymous to avoiding deportation, to be
allowed to work and to claim a place in local society. This is no easy
task, and it often means balancing between being visible to actors who
could help provide this access to basic survival (employers, human rights
organisations, intermediaries, fellow workers), and staying invisible to
others who would threaten it. Health and well-being were inextricably
linked to this balancing act. Malaria, and the technologies used for
its documentation and control (Google maps for locating the sheds
where immigrants lived in the fields, medical diagnostic and preventive
medicine technologies that only were administered to immigrants), were
in many ways understood and experienced as a pretext for further biopo-
litical control and violence against these communities. Indeed, during
the malaria spread, there were more frequent invasions of police forces
into immigrant homes: Fridays after work, and before being paid for the
week, sending many to detention centres, from where some would be
deported. During public health visits, workers did not want to admit
they were sick, because that would often mean being denied work and
housing, but also could not deny examination and treatment because they
were afraid of the repercussions. Outcomes of infection were thus defined
both by how public health and medical technologies were mobilised and
directed specifically to immigrant farmworkers, and as a consequence, by
the meanings infused in malaria itself: both by those who portrayed it as
a “backwards” disease carried by “backwards” subjects, and by those who
suffer it in silence because they are embedded in contexts of exploitation
and exclusion (Evered & Evered, 2012; Kotsila & Kallis, 2019).
As the other cases in this chapter also reveal, institutional oppression
and control exercised through a biopolitics of health and related tech-
nologies, might go unnoticed by those with enough privilege to escape
it. Already in the 1970s, the Italian physician and founder of Medicina
Democratica12 Maccacaro stated: “medicine is entrusted with the task of
resolving, in scientific rationality, this contradiction of the capitalist mode
12 Since the early 1970s Medicina Democratica has been a social movement that fights
for the right to health in Italy. It was born in the working-class struggles and the fight
against toxicity in the workplace, aiming to change the role of science and especially
medicine towards creating knowledge that could be horizontal, collective and participatory.
98 I. IENGO ET AL.
of production, which on the one hand consumes and extinguishes labor

power but on the other needs it to continue to feed itself” (1979, p. 140).
While recognising the need for intersectional approaches to institutional
exclusions from social welfare systems (Bowleg, 2020), we aim to move
towards amplifying the knowledges and transformative justice praxes of
those who are captured and oppressed by the state’s medical govern-
mental gaze (Khan et al., 2022). As Petchesky (2016) argues, “there is
nothing disengaged, neutral or ‘objective’ in the knowledge or technics
that biopolitics employs” (p. 171). Intersectional marginalised communi-
ties, from the non-citizen racialised men working in agricultural fields,
to the working-class woman in the periphery of a metropolis, to the
trans indigenous person with disability, experience in their flesh and bones
that provisions of health often come with some sort of state and medical
violence in its racist, patriarchal, and classist declinations.
Similarly, so, albeit entangled in a different kind of ambivalence with
medical and online technologies, the two “technologies” that opened
up access to place again for Ingrid were: one (the drug) by mitigating
nausea and the other (the vlogs) by situating her experience among other
pregnant people in different contexts, places, work obligations, etc. The
vlogs in particular made her understand both the inaccessibility of certain
aspects of her university campus and also how privileged she was with
regard to the flexibility of work and the protections her contract offered
as a member of a union. She has separate reflections on her experiences
as a bisexual person in terms of the heteronormativity of the obstetri-
cian’s office, campus spaces, and even the vlogs, but she “expected” these
kinds of silences and erasures (and funny moments) of the pregnancy.
However, she did not expect having HG or how important a fraught
drug and watching other pregnant people navigate the condition, explain
how to use Zofran pumps and function at work with HG would be to
even staying pregnant, keeping her job and avoiding deep depression.
She is grateful for these technologies but also cognisant of their origins
and broader troubling connections. Ingrid has lingering questions about
how FPE should understand these technologies (see Nelson et al., 2022).
Conclusions
Through the lenses of the three embodied experiences of chronic pain,
infection and nausea, we explored the themes of porosity and tech-
nology as they offer us ways to insist on the right to be and the politics
of health in FPE. Building on feminist interventions in environmental

humanities, we engaged with the porous relationship between bodies
and places, their mutual as much as disabling exchanges and the onto-
epistemological understandings that arise from this acknowledgement.
The relationship between embodiment and medical/digital technologies
challenge understandings of health as an individual characteristic and
binary opposite of illness, moving towards narratives that account for
health as the complex and ever-changing process deeply affected by access
to mutual aid, care networks, medical and digital technologies (propri-
etary, reclaimed, hacked, never innocent), knowledge over our conditions
and the processes of self-determination to repair harm and dismantle
multiple systemic oppressions ingrained into our societies. The ambivalent
nature of different kinds of technologies employed in and around health
has been explored in their capacity to visibilise or invisibilise experiences.
Our chapter centred what is often at the margins of FPE discussions,
concerning the kinds of porous relations between bodies and places that
continuously permeate and inform politics, from the personal to the
broader social level and the ambivalent meanings and usages of digital
and medical technologies mediating our understanding and experiences
of health and embodiment.
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holder.
CHAPTER 5
Ageing and Feminist Political Ecology
Constance Dupuis and Nanako Nakamura
Introduction: Ageing and FPE

What can making miso tell us about wellbeing in later life? How can
caring for the environment coincide with caring for/with older gener-
ations? How can we take the multiplicity of ageing experiences seriously?
We explore these questions in this chapter through a dialogue on our
fieldwork experiences in Japan and Uruguay, during which we both inves-
tigated the intersection of ageing and environment. We bring to this
discussion the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) on intersec-
tionality, socionatural relations and everyday practices in order to tease
out the complexities of ageing experiences and to help better understand
later life.
C. Dupuis
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: dupuis@iss.nl
N. Nakamura (B)
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: nanako.nakamura@wur.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_5
106 C. DUPUIS AND N. NAKAMURA
Our starting point is that old age is not a state at which we one day
arrive, in the way that retirement age is reached. You do not one day wake
up old.1 Rather, it is an inherently fluid and ambiguous process that takes
place across the life course. Getting old is not easily mapped onto chrono-
logical age; as Rosario Aguirre Cuns and Sol Scavino Solari argue, “being
old appears as a homogenised event due to the feature of having lived
many years, to the decrease in ability (biophysical) and to the proximity
to death. This centrality of chronological age in the representation of old
age is naturalised in common sense and obscures the inequalities, differ-
ences and specificities of the social production of these groups” (Aguirre
Cuns & Scavino Solari, 2018, p. 22). Instead, we examine the nuances in
different embodiments of ageing as a way to look at counter-hegemonic
responses to ideas of ageing that take place throughout one’s life.
Ageing and aged experiences are relationally materialised in different
places, spaces, and environments in everyday practices (Katz, 2018). How,
where, with whom and with what we age is shaped by race, gender,
class, ability, sexuality, place and other important dimensions of differ-
ence. This is where, as authors, we are conscious of the difficulty to speak
across contexts as socially and culturally diverse as Uruguay and Japan.
We are aware that the meanings and experiences of ageing are shifting
and diverse. It may be more accurate to speak of ageing in the plural, as
highlighted in the title of Aguirre Cuns and Scavino Solari’s “Vejeces de
las mujeres ”, meaning “The old ages of women” in Spanish.
To add to the complexity, ageing experiences are not only contextual
but also influenced by normative ideas about ageing that have become
dominant globally. Discourses of successful ageing, active ageing and
healthy ageing circulate at policy and public health levels (World Health
Organisation, 2002, 2020). These discourses reinforce ideas of homo-
geneity in later life, masking the intersection of social differences and
inequalities (Katz & Calasanti, 2015; Sandberg, 2015).
Japan and Uruguay, while contextually diverse, are also subject to the
dominant norms of ageing. One commonality is that these normative
discourses set up clear binaries between what is desirable, good or healthy
1 Though we are aware that the adjective ‘old’ often carries a negative or derogatory
connotation, we are inspired by currents within social gerontology and critical ageing
studies that are working to reclaim the term ‘old’ as a political project, underscoring the
ways in which euphemisms can unintentionally reinforce ageism (Calasanti et al., 2006;
Calasanti, 2008).
5 AGEING AND FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY 107
ageing and what is not. In neoliberal contexts, with the emphasis on the
individual, ideas of successful ageing can be used to justify the retrench-
ment of social and health services in the name of older people’s autonomy
(Dillaway & Byrnes, 2009). The focus on individuals leads not only to
homogenising of ageing experiences, but responsibility for “success” or
“failure” in ageing is placed on individual older people. A focus on indi-
vidualism leaves structural and contextual factors to the side, reinforcing
the reliance on autonomy and the binaries of abled and disabled (Rice
et al., 2017; Sandberg & Marshall, 2017). In our dialogue, we aim to
blur these binaries and highlight the co-construction of those policies and
enacted powers that drive ageing people’s agency in everyday life.
In order to go beyond ageing norms while remaining aware of context
and agency, we look at two examples of collectives which focus on old age.
The first is the Suisha in Japan, a rural women’s traditional food business,
and the second is Uruguay’s national network for older people, REDAM
(Red Nacional de Personas Mayores). We look at ageing in these specific
contexts in order to illustrate the dynamics of social, political, and ecolog-
ical relations. Our empirical studies look at situated ageing experiences to
help diversify the understandings of ageing and later life and to broaden
ageing and environment debates as part of the contours of FPE sketched
in this book.
To our studies on ageing, we bring FPE understandings of everyday
practices and ethics of care. We trace the complexity of ageing people’s
relations, including social and cultural constructions of ageing and inter-
sectional thinking. We question existing power discourses around ageing
by attending to different ways of encountering and caring for others in
everyday practices. Applying FPE concepts such as socionature (Nightin-
gale, 2017), which speaks to the mutually constitutive quality of the
social and the natural, we look at the role of the environment in expe-
riences of ageing. We take up the FPE approach to understanding the
environment as more than the experience of nature in the rural and
urban contexts, instead understanding the environment as a relationally
constructed dynamic process where ageing and aged experiences shape
everyday life as ageing bodies intersect with machines, fungus, poli-
tics and climate in specific processes and contexts. Our focus is on the
points of convergence where everyday life is maintained, continued, and
repaired—that is, everyday caring practices (Tronto, 1993).
Following this explanation of ageing and old age, we briefly explain our
different theoretical interests before presenting our two cases. Nanako
shares stories about Suisha in Japan and Constance about REDAM in

Uruguay. We then discuss FPE, ageing and generational approaches
before proposing ideas for an FPE research agenda on ageing.
Theoretical Approaches
Inspired by FPE’s intersectional thinking, our case studies look at
different struggles that older people engage in and how their responses
go beyond the hegemonic framing of ageing. We bring our two cases into
dialogue as we explore what we can learn across these different contexts.
Although we both draw on experiences from our PhD research, inspired
by and in dialogue with FPE thinking, our PhD projects have different
theoretical moorings, which we now briefly introduce.
Nanako looks at challenges in a rural Japan women’s local business
as a part of their everyday practices, whereas Constance examines in
Uruguay the struggles for ageing concerns to be taken seriously within
sustainability discourses. Nanako applies post-capitalist thinking (Gibson-
Graham et al., 2013) to the Japanese case to see interdependencies of
humans and non-humans (Sato & Alarcón, 2019; Nelson, 2017; Nightin-
gale, 2013) ageing together in everyday practices as a result of hybrid
choices of profit and non-profit making activities. In the context of
Uruguay, Constance draws on rupturist gerontology, a stream of ageing
thinking that speaks to the need to break with hegemonic understandings
of ageing in order to deeply see and understand the everyday expe-
riences and agency of older people (Piña Morán & Gómez Urrutia,
2019). These theoretical understandings allow Constance to explore the
different temporalities (Rhee 2020; Vasquez, 2020) at play within the
Uruguayan case, as well as connect specific ageing and sustainability strug-
gles to broader conversations about socionatures (Nightingale, 2018;
Singh, 2017). We use these differently theorised positions to put older
people into the conversations on situated, everyday experiences circulating
in FPE research and practice.
Stories of Ageing
In the two narratives that follow, we each engage with the other’s
research. The dialogue we present here is based on a series of semi-
structured interviews and the exchanges in a public presentation of our
work in the Feminist Political Ecology Dialogues on Rethinking Age,
Generation and Population.
Nanako: Japan, Kunma Suisha no Sato ( Suisha)

The village of Water Wheel (Kunma Suisha no Sato) is a local women’s
business group in the semi-mountainous Kuma region in Shizuoka Prefec-
ture, Japan. For more than thirty years, Suisha has been producing
hand-made food products and selling them at a roadside shop and restau-
rant that they run, where local people can also sell agricultural products.
The original entities of Suisha’s food business were local women’s collec-
tives, supported by diverse management bodies with different objectives,
that commonly aimed at improving different ways of food preparation,
farming, and other everyday practices through collective learning. Like
many other rural women’s local businesses formed in the 1980s in Japan,
Suisha was supported by the local and national governments in response
to rising voices for gender equality and the urgent need to react to
the challenging situations in ageing and depopulating rural communities.
Since its establishment in 1987, Suisha has been contributing to commu-
nity development and revitalisation, for which the state government
granted it an award in 1989.
One of the guiding questions for my research is what kind of interde-
pendent relationships are found in the attempts made towards community
development by local businesses. Growing up in the capital city of my
home region, I am intrigued by the everyday practices in rural communi-
ties which may be overlooked by mainstream political discourses on rural
revitalisation, practices such as artesian soba noodle and miso making.
Because of Suisha’s business, many people from urban areas have visited
this rural community, invigorating the local economy and enhancing
livelihoods. Despite Suisha’s efforts for rural revitalisation, the situation
confronted by the community is still challenging as ageing and depop-
ulation continue. Suisha’s efforts and practices stirred up my interests:
how do Suisha members embrace the situation with lingering challenges,
while maintaining their businesses? Who are they, emerging from the frag-
mented pieces of everyday practices? In order to explore these questions,
I undertook ethnographic fieldwork for two three-month periods in late
2019 and in 2021–2022 to explore the interdependencies built through
different post-capitalist practices embodied by ageing rural women.
Suisha’s central product is miso, fermented soybeans. Although mass-
produced miso is available at supermarkets, Suisha miso is hand-made as it
would have been decades ago, by each household for self-consumption.
Miso production begins with making fermented malted rice and moves to
cooking soybeans and mixing them with the malted rice. These processes
usually take six days for one batch, with multiple batches in process at the
same time. The fresh miso then goes through the fermentation process for
about a year or two. The most care-intensive process is at the beginning,
when steamed rice and a fungus (Aspergillus oryzae) are mixed and made
into kôji, the fermented malted rice. In the process, temperature control
is crucial in managing the speed of fermentation. In Suisha’s kôji manu-
facturing facility, the temperature is set at 35–40 °C depending on the
fermentation process, and inside and outside temperatures. If successful,
hyphal fungal networks form, developing root- or branch-like filamen-
tous fungal mycelium. It is possible to discern nurtured kôji from its
appearance, frequently described as “kôji blossoms are blooming”.
However, producing blooming kôji at Suisha is not an easy process.
Their old-fashioned and aged equipment does not function properly to
warm up the fermentation room, so Suisha members cannot only rely
on the machinery temperature control. To supplement this defect, Suisha
members check constantly and see if kôji malt grows well. If not, they
discuss whether they should change warm water for humidifying the
fermentation room, or adjust the temperature settings, in the absence
of reliable working technology. These decisions for fine adjustments are
made collectively, based on their experiences. The experienced sensory
notion was referred to as “Kan (感/勘) puter” jokingly by the current
leader of Suisha, not a computer but kan, which means both feeling
and intuition in Japanese. She implied that their affective care is much
more useful for the ageing process of kôji fermentation than inputs from
the machine. It also signifies that the material relationship between the
Suisha members with kôji is tied to other relationships with the aged appa-
ratus. These relationships show that there is not only one way of caring.
Instead, caring relationships emerge from contingency in which kôji, the
machine, and Suisha members are maintaining everyday practices in fluid
and ambiguous ageing processes. Experiencing these ageing processes
becomes part of socionatural relations. Socionatures experienced through
ageing bodies sharpen the sensibility of caring for others, making up
for the shortcomings of supposedly predictable, rational measures usually
provided by mechanised processes. The Suisha leader also illustrated
her own ageing in relation to the materiality of the aged facility; “We,
humans, get old. No wonder machines get old too”. Different ageing
bodies of humans and non-humans navigate and negotiate how to make
decisions about care for kôji, showing that the processes of ageing influ-
ence how we maintain, continue, and repair in everyday life (Tronto,
1993). Togetherness in the different experiences of ageing is relation-
ally embodied through interactions with other humans and non-humans
(other members of Suisha, the kôji, the manufacturing equipment) that
are ageing and surviving together.
Kôji is a hand-made product for Suisha miso. Suisha members pinch
steamed rice using their thumb and ring finger to check the appropriate
softness. Once it is ready, the fungus powder is added to the rice. Suisha
members waste no time and start massaging the rice and the fungus
powder together to make scratches on the surface of the rice grains
and let the mycelium stretch around the network. The steamed rice is
extremely hot at the beginning: when I joined in the activity, I needed
to use a wooden rice scoop, whereas the skilled Suisha members quickly
switched to using their hands to massage the rice. Meanwhile, the rice
and kôji mixture cooled down to human body temperature. The rela-
tionship between Suisha members and kôji is an intimate socionature:
“Your hands are getting smooth, aren’t they? That’s our beauty secret”, a
Suisha member told me while I had trouble scrambling the rice and kôji
mixture. Due to several natural components of kôji, such as Glucocerebro-
side and amino acid, the cosmetic industry has researched its effects on
skin regeneration or healing to harness this “beauty secret”. For Suisha
members, taking care of kôji is not only a process of producing food prod-
ucts, but also human and non-human interactions through affectionate
touching, intuiting how kôji are blooming because of their care. In turn,
the kôji care for aged human bodies. The ageing experiences of Suisha
members are materialised in everyday practices based on ethics, through
affective interactions with other humans and with non-humans (Puig de
la Bellacasa, 2017) (Fig. 5.1).
Rural revitalization is an objective of Suisha’s umbrella organisation, a
non-profit organisation (NPO) Yumemirai-Kunma. The NPO showcases
their economic activities through running a roadside shop and restau-
rant, selling their products to stimulate the local economy. The NPO
was established in 2000 to take over the leading role of the communal
committee, the main group spearheading the communal revitalization
project. Hoping to contribute to rural revitalization in ageing and depop-
ulating communities, Suisha members transformed their business model,
taking over management and supervision duties. Instead of choosing a
capitalist enterprise, they adopted the form of NPO to be able to use the
Fig. 5.1 Kôji making—massaging rice and kôji malt
profit obtained through their food business for non-profit activities and
the community. Unlike mass production companies, Suisha’s products,
such as the miso based on hand-made kôji, gain added value by using
traditional production methods that require more time and effort. Chal-
lenges and intimate human and non-human relationships that appear in
the production processes rarely come to the fore in their rural revital-
ization story, even though vital responses made through encounters with
others manifest behind the scenes. These activities do not directly lead to
profit making, but produce other important values by maintaining tradi-
tional food practices and caring for ageing communities, which enrich
their business profile.
The hybrid approach of profit- and non-profit making exempli-

fies attempts to enhance interdependent relations with others. As an
NPO, Suisha’s food business engages with various other community
members by organising seasonal festivals and touristic events. Most of
the events showcase the nature-rich environment around the roadside
station, attracting urban visitors. By doing so, NPO members expected to
attract more people, potential customers of Suisha, to visit the communi-
ties and the station. Suisha’s business as an NPO attempts to contribute
to local economies and reinvigorate the languishing local atmosphere by
encouraging increased communication among/between the locals and
visitors.
Despite the attempts made by Suisha and the NPO towards economic
revitalization through high-value food business, the situation remains
challenging in ageing and depopulating rural communities. Still, what
drives Suisha is rural women’s ethics in attending to the ageing rural
communities. Encountering others through business practices bridges
different ways and bodies of ageing. The ethics speak to what they need
to do; that is, the ethics of care emanate from the situated ageing rural
women’s perspective.
Ageing also evokes uneasy feelings about what the communities will
look like in the future, a shared notion among the local people. This
uneasiness motivates the entrepreneurship of the rural women, who aim
to make economic relationships with others visiting from outside of
the communities. The prolonged languishing local condition also drives
women in Suisha to attend to the relationships within the communities.
One member noted that they cannot carry on their community-based
business without their communities. “I want to live in Kuma forever,
and I think we want to keep living here even if one of us [husband or
herself] is left alone. In the end, however, there might be no way to
live here. But I want to set up a condition that we can live continu-
ously”. She joined the NPO as a member of staff in 2001 after she retired
from her career as a kindergarten teacher. She is currently in charge of
the lunchbox service for single elderly people and food trucks, one of
NPO’s non-profit-making activities. “I think newly joining members need
to know the origin of Suisha”, meaning how members from different
women’s groups orchestrated different initiatives together with the local
governments, men and other women members in the communities, and
visitors, with the shared commitment of revitalising these communities.
She continued, “that is, to know why current Kuma is not deprived of
a lively atmosphere as people are always visiting”. A monthly gathering

focusing on old people is one of her committed tasks. The objective of
this gathering is to set up a social space focusing on old people, though
not exclusively. She designs the programme for the monthly meeting
at five different locations in the communities. In the first half of the
programme, there are guest speakers or lecturers, such as a local police
officer, public nurse, social worker and elderly care worker. The topics
are varied among different speakers’ professions who share a common
thread of improving the quality of living for elderly people. The second
half of the programme is more recreational, such as playing games, hand-
icraft making or drawing. Overall, the space is interactive and full of lively
talks between participants, NPO/Suisha members, and guests at each
gathering. The participants also take simple health check-ups during the
programme. Frequently, many of these check-ups show worrying results
because the excitement of meeting each other raises their blood pres-
sure. One participant mentioned that the importance of this gathering is
the pre-planned meeting and time to gather with others, apart from the
context of house visits in which community members usually meet.
Originally, the women who gathered from the different local women’s
collectives to start the food business collaboratively suggested the idea
of a monthly gathering for the retired members. While doing activi-
ties such as fermentation, food processing, and farming at Suisha, the
members started talking about their future. Indeed, Suisha members were
happy about what they had made and accomplished, not only economic
opportunities but also space for themselves and social companionship with
others. However, this convivial environment is not ensured in the future
when many members reach retirement age. With this notion, Suisha
embarked on the plan of setting up space for themselves in the future,
which became a space for Suisha members as well as other people in the
communities, who are sharing the process of ageing.
Suisha’s business practices take an approach that is based on hopeful
and ambitious ethics that keep them in the business market while
also caring for non-monetary benefits (Iwasaki & Miyaki, 2001). Their
approach entails diverse ways of connecting with others and building
interdependent relationships to improve everyday life, encompassing
more than monetary benefits gained from the market. Suisha members
attempt to sustain the ethical needs of “surviving well together”, the
central quality of what J. K. Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) call a commu-
nity economy. In ageing and depopulating rural communities, they
attended to the critical concerns of how to sustain a community. They

did so by tapping into their situated knowledge of gendered everyday
practices for their food business. They embodied economic practices with
expanding caring relationships by blurring the binaries of capitalist and
non-capitalist relations, men and women, and the boundaries of commu-
nity membership. Moreover, along with the objectives as a business entity,
they envisaged themselves as ageing entrepreneurial actors making nodes
of connection with others, devising other forms and practices of surviving
well together.
Constance: Uruguay, Red Nacional de Personas Mayores (REDAM)

In 2019, I was six months into my PhD, still working on settling into
my topic and carving out a focus for myself at the intersection of ageing
and environment, when I went to Uruguay on secondment. Soon after
my arrival, I was introduced to the director of Uruguay’s National Insti-
tute for the Elderly. Having shared with her my research interests, she
suggested I attend the next meeting of REDAM, Uruguay’s umbrella
civil society space that brings together diverse organisations that work
for/with/among older people.
Feeling timid with my out-of-practice Spanish, I was immediately
welcomed. Curious about what a young foreigner was doing at a meeting
of elderly Uruguayans, several members introduced themselves. I met a
member of the local pensioners’ association, recently retired and looking
to stay politically active; the coordinator of a seniors’ sports club; a nurse
working in a care home; and a lifelong activist whose current focus was
advocating for the full participation of older people in society. Though
they each had different motivations for participating in REDAM, they
were all invested in REDAM’s objective to increase the political and social
participation of older people in Uruguay.
It was my good fortune that this meeting happened to be the presenta-
tion of the network’s working paper on “Key measures on ageing for the
implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs)” (REDAM, 2019, p. 1). This seven-page document presented a
clear critique of the SDGs as they currently stand, asking why the SDGs
do not “address, either explicitly or implicitly, the rights of older people”
(REDAM, 2019, p. 1). In the document, they go on to identify ways in
which the network calls for further work to be done on ageing and envi-
ronmental sustainability. I was still figuring out what FPE meant for me
and for my work, and here I had come across feminist political ecology in
practice.
I was invited to visit some of the member organisations that popu-
late the network and dove deeper into the questions raised in their
working paper. Over many cups of hot beverages, I learned more about
the network’s work to have older people taken seriously as subjects of
rights in Uruguay. Despite the challenge of holding space for the diversity
of interests present within the network, the REDAM has become a focal
point for advancing the human rights of older people within Uruguay and
across the region. REDAM members participated in the regional process
that culminated in the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-
American Convention on the Protection of the Human Rights of Older
Persons (OAS, 2015). The network’s members mobilised their wealth
of knowledge about both domestic and international advocacy for the
convention. Their important contributions to the process were recognised
by other member states’ civil society organisations for having been key
to the signing and ratification of the convention (González Ballesteros
et al., 2018). The REDAM’s members have been able to draw on their
everyday experiences of confronting ageism and imagining more full ways
for older people to participate in society in order to navigate different
local and international scales. Having gained a powerful international
tool in the form of the OAS Convention, the REDAM’s membership
has also worked to bring these discourses back into their day-to-day
through dissemination activities and by showing how the Convention can
be utilised (Restaño, 2019), such as the above-mentioned critique of the
SDGs.
I am especially grateful for the time I was able to spend with Luisa,2
a lifelong activist who had worked alongside a handful of other REDAM
members in the drafting of this critique of the SDGs from an ageing
perspective. As a member of the network who has actively engaged with
mobilising attention around the importance of participation of older
people, she carried with her much of the institutional memory of the
REDAM.
In recounting some of our conversations, I highlight the insights Luisa
shared with me. When asked why they came to focus on the Sustainable
Development Goals, she shared that she felt a responsibility to contribute
2 Pseudonym.
to a world that could be a little more gentle than when she arrived in
it. Luisa was also quick to point out the forgetfulness of younger gener-
ations. She underscored the irony in some of the sustainability discourse,
that when people go looking for knowledge about how to tread more
lightly on the planet, they often look elsewhere rather than with their
grandparents and elders. Luisa shared this not in a resenting way, but
to point to the pressure of time to be always looking forward, moving
forward (which I would translate as capitalist productivist logics). She
saw this pressure as meaning “there is no time to slow down and have the
slower conversations with older generations”. In addition to the impor-
tance of being included in a programme with societal relevance, Luisa felt
she also had important contributions to make to the sustainability discus-
sion. This was also reflected in the REDAM’s document in reference to
SDG 15—Life on Land: “As society, we must take into account the expe-
riences of older people, their knowledge of the territory and of gentle
forms of production with the Earth. Generational bridges should be built
to allow for the transmission of these knowledges” (REDAM, 2019, p. 4).
Having had the chance to understand the process that led to the
creation of the REDAM’s SDG statement, I was very much looking
forward to returning to Uruguay in early 2020 to see how the network
was going to bring this document to life. Two factors coincided to make
these plans impossible. First, after fifteen years of a progressive coalition
government that achieved impressive and internationally recognised social
gains, a conservative coalition won a fiercely contested election in the
spring of 2019. This transition of government included the emptying out
of many social institutions, including the National Institute for the Elderly
which was the convenor of the REDAM. This process left REDAM a
shell of its former self. It became clear that the work the network had
been doing when I visited in early 2019 had, at least for the moment,
been put to the side. The second factor was the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite these setbacks, Luisa and the REDAM’s work has made impor-
tant contributions, both nationally and regionally, to thinking about age
and sustainability.
Understandings of Ageing
from an FPE Perspective
These two experiences speak to distinct dimensions of ageing in vastly
different contexts. Nanako brings out the interdependencies of care
between older women, fungi and machines as well as a look into commu-
nity economies from an ageing perspective. Constance touches on older
people’s agency and utilising civil society spaces to put forward their
priorities at the intersection of sustainability and ageing. Despite the
differences in these approaches to thinking about wellbeing in later life,
putting them into dialogue has been fruitful for each of our under-
standings of ageing and has allowed us to carve out key insights at the
intersection of ageing and FPE. In the following discussion, we draw out
and elaborate on the broad themes of ageing and rurality, ageing and
social/natural relations and community and economy.
Ageing and Rurality

Within studies on ageing, there is a clear divide between thinking about
urban ageing and rural ageing in relation to demographic and social
changes (Berry & Kirschner, 2013; World Health Organization, 2015).
While insights into what distinguishes urban and rural ageing experi-
ences can be helpful, this kind of binary thinking can also be limiting.
In our above two studies, ageing experiences show that the urban and
the rural settings are blurred; they are a web of different places, spaces,
and environments where ageing experiences are materialised in everyday
practices (Katz, 2018). In other words, the urban/rural divide obscures
more than it illuminates; indeed, this picks up on wider literature within
human geography that speaks of the rural as relational (Little, 2002). We
also contribute to ageing geographies, which emphasise the ways older
people interact with and are impacted by their environments (Andrews &
Skinner, 2015; Skinner et al., 2015). As such, it may be more useful
to relate ageing to individually unique experiences in everyday practices
rather than to chronologically laid out demography (Aguirre Cuns &
Scavino Solari, 2018; Katz, 2018).
Nanako’s case may seem to conform to “rural ageing thinking”,
but Suisha’s business shows rural women’s engagement with ageing by
encouraging rural and urban interchange. Generally, the rural popula-
tion is more drastically ageing than urban areas due to people leaving
the countryside for education and work in addition to the older gener-
ation living much longer than in the past (Berry & Kirschner, 2013),
which raises concerns about the sustainability in the everyday practices
in the rural context (Ôno, 2008; Tamazato, 2009). Yet, rurality in the
Japanese context can also represent attraction or nostalgia connected
with the rural landscape (Tanaka, 2017). A rustic, mosaic landscape with
diverse vegetation is a cohabiting space of humans and nature, in which
people manage natural resources as a part of traditional rural livelihood
practices. That type of landscape, and its embodied human and non-
human relationships, evoke nostalgia and affectionate feelings associated
with the image of “hometown” or Kokyou/Furusato in Japanese (Yukawa,
2017). That positive association is used in attempts at rural revitalization
to attract more people to come and visit, and eventually settle down in
the countryside (Love, 2007; Tanaka, 2017). Instead of performing rural
ageing in a frame of the rural and urban dichotomy, Suisha’s business
showed experiences of ageing together. Suisha’s business model places the
traditional food practices of “hand-made” and “locally-produced” in the
semi-mountainous remote area at the centre of their business. By doing
so, they build and use their rurality as a business tool to sell their food
products and attract more people to visit the shop and restaurant. In this
way, challenges emerging from the rural context are addressed by non-
binary rural and urban actors as a response to the sustainability concerns
in the ageing and depopulating rural context.
In the Uruguayan experience, with almost half of the country’s
population living in the capital Montevideo, there exists a strong Montev-
ideo/interior divide.3 Though most of the REDAM members Constance
came to know were from towns, the fact that they were from the interior
positioned them differently—in a blurred, neither fully urban nor fully
rural, experience. Many of these members faced the struggles of having
to travel or relocate to access health and care services in larger centres,
a common problem for rural ageing. And yet, through engaging in civil
society spaces such as REDAM, many of these members’ access to and
participation in national and regional policy and activist spaces is more
indicative of what is typically thought of as an urban experience of ageing.
With regard to the REDAM’s emphasis on sustainability, the network
focuses on addressing climate issues as interconnected and brings together
both urban and rural concerns. By virtue of being a national network
with members representing each region and department of Uruguay, the
REDAM has aimed to do justice to the specificity of its members’ diverse
3 With almost half of Uruguay’s population living in Montevideo, the coastal capital
city, the usual concentration of economic, cultural and political power that typically takes
place in a capital is exacerbated in Uruguay. This has resulted in many disparities between
the interior and the capital (Fernández Aguerre, 2017).
experiences while also articulating clear advocacy goals for the network as
a whole. Their critique of the SDGs is a reflection of this. These examples
add to the diversity of rural ageing experiences, underscoring the need for
embodied and situated nuance.
Approach to Ageing and Social/Natural Relations

FPE’s intersectional thinking (Rocheleau et al., 1996) offers a grounding
to analyse gendered social differences that are embodied in environmental
engagements (Harcourt & Nelson, 2015). FPE’s relational thinking
suggests a perspective that generation and age intersect with social differ-
ences, shaping power dynamics (Elmhirst et al., 2017; Nelson, 2017).
Drawing on those strands of FPE, both our cases tease out the complexity
of ageing people’s relations and open up new opportunities to understand
how to care for others in the past, present, and future, beyond the binary
between human and nature (Nightingale, 2013). Contrastingly, the
approach we have each taken has brought out different understandings
of environment.
By illuminating care for relational ties in everyday practices, Nanako’s
case not only shows a space in which socionatural relationships emerge
through Suisha’s business, but also questions the gaps in care between
ageing rural women, miso, machines, and fungus. Ageing bodies expe-
rience lingering challenges in maintaining livelihoods with old fashioned
machines and accessing social services such as elder care, even if Suisha’s
business contributes to rural revitalization and the local economy. Thus,
challenges come into play in shaping everyday ageing experiences in
different places, spaces, and environments (Katz, 2018), yet these strug-
gles also contribute to socionatural interdependencies. Still the gaps in
care also demonstrate the need for additional services from social and
political actors in the region.
With the more abstract entry point of discourses around the SDGs in
the Uruguay case, Constance focused on how the REDAM’s members’
everyday practices of struggle. Their desires to be actively present in
policy conversations about sustainability and care for the environment
cross multiple temporalities. For some, the main motivation to participate
touched upon hopes to protect and nurture places that had meaning for
them, maintaining relationships to their pasts. Others were more moti-
vated by the need to be heard, to be included in the debates, struggling
against the invisibilising of older people. As mentioned, Lucia identi-

fied a responsibility to future generations as a motivation for her. Also,
understandings of mutuality were prevalent in Uruguay, with participants
speaking to the idea of treating the environment gently and it too will
treat you gently.
Drawing on FPE’s approach to social and natural relations allows us
to see that possibilities for continuing everyday life emerge from inter-
actions of ageing others and different places and environments. Though
not explored in depth in our narratives above, we found it interesting that
people of varying ages participated in each of the groups. Some of the
younger participants in both spaces spoke to the importance of investing
in spaces for them to continue to be engaged and active in their own old
age- an investment in a future temporality of sorts. While we started ques-
tioning the division in urban and rural ageing, our attempts of bringing
ageing to FPE can shift the focus to tune in to other divisions between
humans and nature, young and old, and other dichotomies alike.
Community Economies and Post-capitalist Perspectives on Ageing

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “being-in-common” (1991), post-
capitalist community economies’ understanding of care offers insights
into the interdependency of various economic beings and how individuals
become communities in order to survive well together (Gibson-Graham,
2006). As shown in the Japanese case, ageing experiences embodied by
rural women involve care for other humans and non-humans. Suisha’s
survivall relies on caring for others and themselves in the ageing process;
that is, not just ageing well individually, but also surviving well together
with ageing others by appropriating profits gained from their food busi-
ness for other-than-capitalist wellbeing. These practices that go beyond
the binary thinking of capitalist and non-capitalist framing rest on care
for others, and themselves in the context of an uncertain future cannot
be static or decisive. By unravelling the process of how rural women make
different decisions in everyday practices, Nanako’s case emphasised that
ageing experiences are relational and constituted together with others
based on their ethics of surviving well together. The ethics of care for
others also embraces the sensibility of ageing with others, contributing to
a collective experience and construction of ageing. Thus, post-capitalist
thinking can highlight how actors are not framed by limited definitions
such as women and men, human and nature, but rather, are seen as
emerging economic beings (Nancy, 1991; Gibson-Graham, 2006).
Ageing beings are caring for others in both cases, constructing commu-
nities based on interdependent relationships through pursuing Suisha’s
local business in Japan and climate justice from the elderly perspective
in Uruguay. They produce and reproduce interdependent relationships,
the foundation of community economies, rather than championing care
as outside of profit making or denying capitalists’ way of wellbeing.
This relational, non-binary thinking examines how to “survive well”
together with humans and non-humans by balancing business practices
and wellbeing while caring for the differently interdependent economic
relationships (Gibson-Graham et al., 2013, p. 21).
Rupturist Gerontology
In analysing the Uruguayan case, rupturist gerontology (Piña Morán &
Gómez Urrutia, 2019) helps to understand the link between age and
gender by analysing social roles. Rupturist gerontologists and feminist
writers both reject the framing of old age as a period “without activ-
ity” (ibid.; p. 14). This approach breaks with the idea of the elderly as
“subjects of care”, overcoming the dichotomy of receivers and givers.
Through this lens, care becomes a relational feature that informs our
interactions with others and with life in its diversity. The complex moti-
vations of the members of REDAM speak to this relational, sometimes
contradictory, complexity. The clear demand to be seen and heard is an
attempt to counter the invisibilisation of older people. Their choice as a
collective to focus on an issue such as environmental sustainability speaks
to their willingness to invest in future wellbeing they may not be present
to enjoy. These are both motivations that are focused on building rela-
tions. REDAM members could thus be seen as demanding more care
and demanding more contexts in which they can offer care. This rela-
tional approach to care, essential within FPE and articulated strongly
within rupturist gerontology, places older people in relation with others,
making decisions collectively and imagining new realities, recognising the
knowledges, perspectives, shortcomings, experiences and limitations that
are part and parcel of older people’s livelihoods.
Concluding Thoughts
In this chapter, we present a case for including ageing in the current
contours of FPE research. In demonstrating the value of such an analysis,
we have brought two distinct ageing experiences—Suisha, the women’s
local business in Japan, and REDAM, a national network for older people
in Uruguay—into the conversation. We highlighted that ageing is neither
fixed nor binary but is about the embodied experiences and agency of
older people. Our distinct theoretical groundings and our different inter-
pretations of FPE allowed us to learn from each other’s case and deepen
our understanding of our own. These threads emerged at the intersection
of ageing and FPE, enriching the understanding of ageing experiences.
In both cases, we draw on ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017)
in thinking about older people and the ageing process. The Suisha case
shows care for kôji and other people in the past, present, and future,
while REDAM’s case shows care for future generations by ageing people
claiming their own presence. Understandings of socionatural relations
have also helped us explore more deeply the layered relations in which
ageing takes place.
Age is often overlooked or under-examined as both a dimension of
power and as a bio-social process within FPE-inspired work. As both cases
show, age is a central factor within embodied care practices and enhances
the interdependency in socionatural relationships that support wellbeing.
With ageing itself being a series of ongoing relational changes, we have
made the case for what can be gained at the intersection of ageing and
environment in the hopes that others also take up questions of age and
intergenerational wellbeing within research on embodiment, socionatural
relationality and everyday practices of care.
Acknowledgements We would like to express our deep gratitude to Ana

Agostino for her ongoing support in bringing these ideas together. Also, many
thanks to Rebecca Elmhirst and Wendy Harcourt for devoting their time and
energies to reviewing our manuscript and providing us with valuable suggestions.
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holder.
CHAPTER 6
More-Than-Human Co-becomings: The

Interdependencies of Water, Embodied
Subjectivities and Ethics
Nick Bourguignon, Irene Leonardelli, Enid Still,

Ingrid L. Nelson, and Andrea J. Nightingale
Introduction
In a small drought-prone rural village in Maharashtra, Pravah,1 India,
farmers irrigate their farms using the wastewater of the city of Pune.
Water becomes multiple and troubled as it is used, embodied, and
experienced in different ways. Water(s) and women farmers co-become
through their varied relationships to one another. Similarly, the journey
of the Tagus River through Spain and Portugal tells a story of multiple,
troubling waters interwoven with landscapes, people, histories and more-
than-human co-becomings. The Tagus as an entity is shaped by multiple
1 All names of people and dwelling places are pseudonymised, names of rivers and
infrastructure are not changed.
N. Bourguignon
University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: nico.bourguignon@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_6
130 N. BOURGUIGNON ET AL.
human interests—irrigation, human consumption, international rela-

tions—but also shapes human communities within and beyond its basin.
These stories raise contradictions and ethical concerns that highlight the
importance of thinking through more-than-human interdependencies to
understand how water- and hydro-scapes emerge.
Whether a village served by a wastewater scheme in Maharashtra, India,
or an inter-basin water transfer infrastructure in Spain, hydraulic schemes
and infrastructures create webs of relations within and across multiple
scales. This inspires us to grapple with more-than-human concerns. The
term “more-than-human” situates humans within the sticky webs of rela-
tions, making humans interdependent with other beings and materials
(Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2003; Isaacs & Otruba 2019). We focus on the
relationality of the more-than-human to consider the ethical contradic-
tions that flow of power within these webs engender. These relations can
be life-giving or denying (Bawaka Country et al., 2013; Singh, 2013;
Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014), create socionatural difference and inequal-
ities (Ahmed & Zwarteveen, 2012; Harris, 2006; Nightingale, 2006;
Sultana, 2009), and permeate the co-constitution of embodied subjec-
tivities (Nightingale, 2006, 2011; Singh, 2013). Particularly, we focus
on water and the ways it co-constitutes uneven relations between and
within different human beings, other beings and materials across multiple
times and scales (Neimanis, 2012). In doing so, we recognise that our
attempt to grapple with the more-than-human is always situated, partial
and shaped by our positionalities.
I. Leonardelli (B)
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands
e-mail: i.leonardelli@un-ihe.org
E. Still
e-mail: Enid.Still@Uni-Passau.De
I. L. Nelson
University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
e-mail: prof.ing.nel@gmail.com
A. J. Nightingale
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: andrea.nightingale@sosgeo.uio.no
6 MORE-THAN-HUMAN CO-BECOMINGS … 131
In this chapter, Irene Leonardelli presents the section dedicated to

Pravah in the second person, recognising herself as a researcher generating
data together with a translator as well as with local researchers-activists
and informants in the village. Nick Bourguignon presents the section
dedicated to the Tagus River in the first person, recounting his experi-
ences and knowledge of the river. Enid Still engages with these narratives
philosophically by thinking through the ethical implications of more-than-
human interdependencies. Ingrid Nelson and Andrea Nightingale have
been co-thinkers through the entire process, helping to find a narrative
thread, navigate the wide literatures on socionatures and reflect on femi-
nist political ecology (FPE) praxis. Together, we aim to think of waters
through different lenses and in different geographies, with specific histo-
ries and socialities, while remaining aware that our human histories and
privileges shape these representations of waters. This movement between
different positions of the self in relation to water and the more-than-
human is intentional, as we feel it reflects the way water is unbound,
percolates through bodies and soils, shapes both alliances and conflicts
between different actors, such as the state, community organisations and
farmers.
Framing more-than-human interdependencies within FPE means
starting from an understanding of relationality rather than the experi-
ence of distinct individuals (Nightingale, 2011; Rowe, 2005). Exploring
this relationality as entangled, multiple and situated has enabled femi-
nist political ecologists to contribute to debates on how subjectivities are
co-constituted with the more-than-human (Nightingale, 2006). Andrea
Nightingale (2013) demonstrates that Scottish fishermen’s emotional and
political subjectivities are co-constituted by the sea; it can give or take life,
it can create a sense of purpose and bend political will, and it can create
or destroy possibilities for fishermen. Secondly, intersectional inquiry into
how power operates within these entanglements has enabled nuanced
accounts of how gender, caste, class, age, seniority, marital positions
and ethnicity are differently implicated in the community management
of ecological resources (Elmhirst et al., 2017; Nyantakyi-Frimpong,
2019). Furthermore, FPE questions how socionaturally constituted
power dynamics refract upon hierarchical social relations and boundaries,
as well as wider systems of power such as colonialism (Nelson, 2017;
Nightingale, 2011).
For this chapter, we draw on this work in FPE and related disci-
plines, focusing on the development of the concept of more-than-human
interdependence in an attempt to trouble essentialising narratives that

may be read into such complex and situated relationships (Barad, 2007;
Bawaka Country et al., 2013; Haraway, 2003; Nelson, 2017; Nightin-
gale, 2013; Rose, 2012). In doing so, we remain aware that writing about
the more-than-human is a socially mediated process, despite the multiple
forms of more-than-human agency that go beyond the immediate human
experience.
The next section begins with the case of Pravah, where a wastewater
reuse scheme allows farmers to farm throughout the year, cultivating
different crops both for household consumption and to sell at the
market. However, the wastewater that is used for irrigation percolates
into the village’s shallow aquifer contaminating the existing, scarce, water.
Women, who primarily bear responsibility for water, have to navigate
different levels of contamination at water sources and adjust their practices
accordingly. The concept of “waterscape” flags an ontological definition
of water where power is enrolled in co-constitutive representations and
materialities of water (Baviskar, 2007). Next, we journey with Nick’s
account, where the river’s ebbs and flows constitute fuel and food that
sustains the lives of many beings, as well as embodied memories of co-
becoming with the multiple existences of “the Tagus”. Bubbling forth in
Eastern Spain, the Tagus cuts through canyons and pine forests, mean-
ders past Toledo and across plains and dehesas, joining the Atlantic Ocean
in Lisbon. Yet the waters also join with the Mediterranean through the
Tagus-Segura Interbasin Water Transfer. Wastewater from Madrid’s 6.6
million inhabitants joins the Tagus with wafts of ammonia, to bubble
through Toledo. The concept of “hydrosocial territory” helps explore
the multiple scales of contested socionatural materializations of spatially
bound networks of the river (Boelens et al., 2016). Finally, we discuss
the situated knowledges and ethical implications that emerge from these
ethnographic explorations and the way they illuminate interdependencies
in particular ways that can inform processes of co-becoming with water.
Each of the following sections discuss how such interdependencies are
lived and yet often obscured, and how thinking with the politics of inter-
dependency can enable us to narrate the situated complexities of their
emergence as a process of co-becoming.
Gender-Water Intra-Action
in a Wastewaterscape in Maharashtra, India
The main public well in the village is called Sakarbai [sugar lady] because its
water used to be pure, fresh and sweet. (…) Water was very scarce outside
the monsoon season, but it was so good that it used to taste like coconut
water. She [Sakarbai] used to give us the best water even in summer, when
we used to climb down the well to get whatever water we could find. But
after we started using wastewater for irrigation, she [Sakarbai] was really
badly affected. It’s not her fault, but her water became disgusting, so we
stopped drinking it.
Interview with Sonali, 28 February 2020
Sonali, a seventy-year-old woman belonging to the Maratha caste -the

upper caste in the village of Pravah- and who worked her entire life as a
farmer, is talking while sitting on the floor of her house. Sakarbai is the
name of the well where she used to fetch water for drinking and other
domestic purposes since she moved to Pravah as a just-married child,
at the age of six. Around 2009, Sakarbai started changing. It happened
as more farmers in Pravah started buying wastewater to irrigate, taking
advantage of a wastewater reuse system called the Purandar Lift Irriga-
tion Scheme. This was designed by the Government of Maharashtra in
the early 2000s to address water scarcity in 60 rural villages located in the
Purandar sub-district, southeast of Pune. Wastewater is pumped up from
the Mula-Mutha river, which flows through Pune collecting untreated
water from the urban sewer system and industrial effluents, manufac-
turing industries, construction sites, automotive garages and hospitals
(Jagtap & Manivanan, 2019). Farmers can buy wastewater outside the
monsoon season, usually from January until June when their wells are
empty. Along with traditional rainfed crops such as bajra (pearl millet)
and jowar (sorghum), they use wastewater to irrigate different non-
traditional crops, particularly flowers, to sell at markets in nearby towns
and in Pune. Wastewater reaches Pravah through a system of pump houses
and pipelines; farmers store it in private water ponds (Leonardelli et al.,
2022). From these ponds, wastewater percolates into the shallow aquifer
of the village, contaminating the existing, albeit scarce, groundwater. This
way, all wells (those used for irrigation as well as Pravah’s former drinking
water well Sakarbai) get recharged with (at least partly) contaminated
water.
As the Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme changes water flows, a

wastewaterscape (Karpouzoglou & Zimmer, 2016) emerges. This entails
new material-discursive relations between different humans and waters.
Wastewater opens up possibilities (e.g., for irrigating and thus farming
differently) and closes down others (e.g., drinking pure and sweet
groundwater), re-articulating more-than-human relations in troubling
ways that raise ethical questions and concerns. Here we unfold some
of these re-articulations focusing on the interdependencies between
women farmers2 and water, thereby troubling boundaries that signify
what is considered an ethical encounter. We make this choice because
in Pravah, like throughout Maharashtra and other parts of rural India,
fetching water, cooking, cleaning, washing and bathing children are
tasks performed mostly by women. Women also perform much of the
everyday work in the farm, work which is profoundly mediated by water
(Krishna & Kulkarni, 2019). The focus on women farmers also stems
from our ethico-political commitment to complicate dominant repre-
sentations, challenging the processes through which women farmers’
experiences, knowledges and practices are marginalised and/or silenced,
especially those of women farmers of Scheduled Castes,3 landless women,
single women and widows (Bhat, 2016). Indeed, the conceptualization
of “farmers” in India most often reproduces the imaginary of farmers as
male landowners (Agarwal, 2003; Padhi, 2012; Still, 2022).
Feminist scholars studying water in rural, agrarian contexts have
shown how gender and water are intimately interwoven (Ahmed &
Zwarteveen, 2012; Bossenbroek & Zwarteveen, 2018; Harris, 2006;
Mehta, 2014; Sultana, 2009). Their interdependence is simultaneously
material, symbolic and discursive, with “gender” and “water” (and all
that emerges in their relation for instance farming) continuously co-
constituting and re-defining one another (Bossenbroek & Zwarteveen,
2018). Re-allocations of water, for instance, those fostered by neoliberal
processes of development, imply changes in gender labour relations, roles
2 We use the category of “women farmers” to refer to people who, during our field-
work, identified themselves as such, though sticking to a definition of gender as a fluid
“performative accomplishment” (Butler, 1990) shaping a myriad of different subjectivities.
3 “Scheduled Caste” is a politically imposed category that encompasses all castes consid-
ered to be outside the caste or varna system, and who are therefore systemically oppressed
and socio-economically disadvantaged. It is a recognised term in the Constitution of India
and is used to enable reservation status for those from scheduled castes, to enable their
representation in social and political life (see Gnana, 2018).
and responsibilities, thus also re-defining gendered embodied subjectivi-

ties (Harris, 2006). At the same time, experiences such as headaches and
backaches from hauling heavy loads of water, as well as the health impli-
cations arising from consuming unsafe water, illustrate how embodied
gendered subjectivities are spatially produced through everyday dealings
with water (Sultana, 2009).
These studies have pointed out how everyday dealings with water
significantly shape gendered embodied subjectivities. Yet what we aim
to emphasise here is that how water behaves in and through specific
landscapes (seeping, percolating, overflowing, evaporating) and what it
transports (algae, sediments, organic matters, contaminants) also play a
role in co-constituting specific gendered embodied subjectivities.
In order to reflect these fluid sensibilities, we draw inspiration from
post-human and Science and Technology Studies (STS) feminist scholars,
as they cultivate sensitivity for what more-than-humans, and water
particularly, trigger and afford in socionatural relations (Barad, 2007;
Neimanis, 2017; Pickering, 2009). Particularly, Barad (2007)’s concept
of intra-action helps focus the analysis on how human bodies and more-
than-human bodies co-constitute one another simultaneously, discursively
and materially, meaning they do not exist as separate, discrete entities.
This conceptualization helps us decentre the idea that humans domi-
nate matter to instead pay more attention to the specific behaviours that
different humans and more-than-humans, including water, afford as they
relate. This becomes useful when unpacking how gendered subjectivities
embodied by women farmers of different castes and classes and water
co-become in the wastewaterscape of Pravah.
The Multiple Waters of Pravah

Around 2011, soon after the wastewater reuse scheme started func-
tioning, Sonali and all other women farmers across caste and class noticed
that the colour of Sakarbai water had become more and more turbid;
its taste was more bitter, and unpleasant. At the same time, people fell
sick with stomach diseases, which they related to the water they were
drinking. These sensorial and embodied experiences laid a foundation
for women farmers across castes to re-signify what water is: how and for
which purposes it could be used. Though they appreciated the abundance
of water in Sakarbai, as they no longer had to depend on government-
sponsored water trucks or walk long distances to fetch water during
the driest months of the year, they deemed Sakarbai water as unclean,
smelly, “full of chemicals” and “dangerous”. “It’s not her fault ” said
Sonali: recognising how this exogenous water flow damaged the local
“sweet” and “pure” water of their aquifer. For a few years, the Gram
Panchayat [village council], in consultation with the local doctor, added
a “medicine” to Sakarbai water to disinfect it, to heal it, before using it
for drinking and cooking.
Then around 2016, the Gram Panchayat decided to instal a water
vending machine (commonly known as a water ATM) behind the main
square of the village. This technology purifies Sakarbai’s water through a
reverse osmosis system to make it safe to drink. Most women farmers now
buy this filtered water for drinking; those who can afford it also use it for
cooking- mostly women farmers from the Maratha (upper) caste. Other
women (mostly those belonging to Scheduled Castes) and the least well-
off farmers of the Maratha caste still go to Sakarabi to fetch water for
cooking. Only women farmers belonging to a less well-off caste (a Non-
Scheduled herding caste) and residing about 2 km away from the main
village do not buy filtered water for drinking but disinfect the one they
find in their irrigation well. For them, filtered water is too expensive and
too long a walk.
For washing clothes, cleaning and bathing, women of all castes use
the water they get from the taps installed outside of almost every house
of the main village. Tap water is pumped from two public wells located
close to several wastewater ponds, transported through a closed pipeline
to a water tank, where it is disinfected, and then distributed to the taps.
Women farmers told us that this water remains highly contaminated: they
would never use it for drinking or cooking, not even after disinfecting
it or boiling it themselves. Sometimes it smells badly, especially during
the driest months when they buy the greatest quantities of wastewater.
Moreover, women farmers of all castes often complain about irritations
and rashes on their arms and legs, as well as about hair loss as they use tap
water for bathing. Women farmers of the herding caste residing far away
from the main village do not have access to tap water as the pipelines
connected to the water tank do not reach as far. Since their shelters are
located next to the wells they use for irrigating, they pump water directly
and use it for domestic uses. They say that well water is pure enough as it
percolates from the irrigation ponds where wastewater is initially stored,
and in the process is purified by the soil.
In fact, in the narratives of women farmers across castes, the materi-

ality of wastewater changes as it percolates through the soil of Pravah,
mixing with groundwater: the longer it percolates, the more it purifies
and becomes somehow less exogenous, and therefore also less “bad” and
“dangerous” (see Leonardelli & Tozzi, forthcoming). The wastewater
stored in the irrigation ponds is deemed the most contaminated. Women
farmers know this as they use it across the farm: it smells badly, it contains
algae and looks foamy and turbid, especially when it is just delivered. They
told us that animals (cows and goats) often get sick if they drink directly
from those ponds.
As women farmers navigate and make sense of water quality through
the landscape of Pravah, water becomes multiple waters. At different
sources, they get water for different purposes; they store them separately
and treat them differently. Significantly, while everyone in the village at
least partly adjusts their water practices, more well-off farmers (mostly
belonging to the upper Maratha caste) have better means to deal with the
consequences of this contamination: for instance, buying filtered water
for multiple purposes and not just for drinking, accessing medicines and
health services if necessary (see also Mehta & Karpouzoglou, 2015).
At the same time, because wastewater percolates in the shallow aquifer,
it brings new irrigation and farming opportunities to all farmers of Pravah,
not only to those who can afford to buy wastewater for irrigation. Well-
off farmers belonging to upper castes can easily access the benefits of the
Purandar Lift Irrigation Scheme; they can afford the cost of wastewater
as well as the agricultural inputs required to engage in irrigated farming,
cultivating diverse crops throughout the year (Leonardelli et al., 2022).
Yet less well-off farmers (who are usually of Scheduled Castes and the
herding caste) also find more water in their wells: some of them are able
to farm on larger plots of land, including commercial crops like flowers.
This way, as wastewater percolates through the landscape of Pravah, it
benefits farmers across castes, even those that do not have the means to
access the irrigation scheme directly.
These new farming opportunities mean both new responsibilities and
work burdens for women across castes (Leonardelli et al., 2022). While
they play an increasingly important role in deciding what to cultivate and
how to organise the work, commercial cash crops such as flowers require
a lot of care and effort. Women farmers across castes are increasingly
involved in irrigation and in spreading pesticides- tasks that have histor-
ically been part of the male domain. Yet, wastewater fosters the growth
of unwanted weeds, and thus long hours of strenuous weeding work.

Women farmers need to carefully supervise the irrigation process to clear
the drips when they are plugged by sediments and algae and wash them
with an acid lotion after every cropping cycle (see also Leonardelli &
Tozzi, forthcoming). This sheds light on how what wastewater transports
and what it is made of also matters in re-articulating everyday work in the
farm, and thus also in shaping embodied subjectivities.
Through their intra-action, (waste)water and women farmers co-
become in Pravah, in ways that sometimes reinforce and sometimes go
beyond caste differences (Nightingale, 2011; see also Leonardelli et al.,
2022). In this regard, the relations that enact the wastewaterscape of
Pravah are troubling and ambiguous: as wastewater flows from the city to
rural areas, it carries particles that co-constitute human and more-than-
human bodies. It allows farmers across castes to cultivate and sell more
crops throughout the year, but it also pollutes the aquifer, badly affecting
the health and well-being of more-than-human bodies, including people’s
bodies, water, soil, animals (Leonardelli & Tozzi, forthcoming). While
farmers, including women farmers across castes, are generally satisfied
with being able to sell crops throughout the year and to diversify their
livelihood, they -and we, with them- remain entangled in the different
“goods” and “bads” at play from using untreated wastewater for irrigation
(Abrahamsson et al., 2015). The ethical slipperiness of these more-than-
human entanglements enables reflection on the nature of ethics when
conceptualised within processes of more-than-human co-becoming- a
conceptualisation we grapple with in the final section.
Water Across Time, Space, Basins and Subjects—The Tagus River

Recognising individual human attachment to place, territory or country
infuses the political into debates within and across more-than-human enti-
ties that pulse through multi-scalar spaces (Bawaka Country et al., 2013).
It is also a way of thinking through the troubles of one’s positionality
in relation to spaces that are always co-constituted by the intra-action
between oneself, other humans and more-than-humans (Barad, 2007).
Storytelling of the more-than-human (Multispecies Editing Collective,
2017; Tsing, 2015) has the potential to narrate complex stories about
the entanglements of life (Fenske & Norkunas, 2017). I therefore tell my
own story of interdependence with a river that has been present in my life
and is the subject of my own research—the Tagus River.
Visiting stretches of the river reveals different realities that a domi-

nant discourse may hide. Where a political ecology of water (Baviskar,
2007; Boelens et al., 2016; Swyngedouw; 1999) helps think of large
and complex hydrosocial territories, feminist contributions (Harris 2006;
Neimanis, 2012; Sultana, 2011) emphasise the situatedness, subjectiv-
ities and relations of human bodies vis-a-vis more-than-humans, often
articulated through the concept of waterscapes. By articulating this
story from my situated feminist perspective, I see the Tagus River as a
hydrosocial territory and explore ethical dilemmas within it. Hydrosocial
territoriality helps me think of the divergent discourses that (re)produce
material relations and subjects within a (dominant) political order, which
incorporates multiple territorialities across scales, different actors—partic-
ularly irrigation communities4 —and where dominant modes reconfigure
material relations and subjects through particular water truths and knowl-
edge claims (Harris 2006; Boelens et al., 2016). The frictions that
emerge when non-dominant territories are pulled into a political order
are captured in how inhabitants of the Tagus basin—myself included—
narrate, live and experience the river.
The Divergent Flow(s) of the Tagus

The Tagus emerges in a pine grove at 1,600 metres above sea level in
Eastern Spain. It leaps westward, gaining speed, until it flows through
deep canyons lined with willows and poplars and eagles fly above. This
early stretch has human visitors camping and hiking alongside the clear
green water, as my family has done, connecting to the riverine landscape
produced over geological time. Historically, loggers navigated pine logs
along the canyon walls down to the city of Toledo, where they became
embedded in buildings and cities.
The river encounters its first human obstacles in the reservoirs of
Entrepeñas, Buendía and Bolarque. Since 1979, some Tagus waters flow
artificially southeast, across the plains of Castille la Mancha through 286
kilometres of canals and pipes, into the Mundo River and then into the
4 Irrigation communities are historic as well as contemporary water user associations

that use historic and existing irrigation schemes. They are regulated by law (2001
Spanish national hydrological plan) and receive public water concessions from river basin
authorities (Hernández-Mora et al., 2014).
Segura River, watering the historical and expanding irrigation fields of the
Spanish Levant (Morote et al., 2020).
Exiting its original canyons, the river meanders down the plains of
Guadalajara, with less flow and energy due to the syphoning off to
Spain’s levant. It reaches Aranjuez, where irrigation communities have
cultivated strawberries for centuries (Moreno, 1980), and a few kilome-
tres further downstream the Jarama River joins it. The Jarama is artificially
swollen, receiving water transfers from other tributaries to slake the thirst
of Madrid’s 6 million inhabitants and industries, bringing with it waste.
Urban residents of Madrid are physically embodied in the waste that flows
down the Jarama into the Tagus, even if awareness of this finishes at the
flush of a toilet. As a child, I played in and fell ill from this water that had
strong tangs of ammonia.
The polluted river reaches the Castrejón reservoir, before it is chan-
nelled along the Castrejón canal. While the canal waters fields, the
river itself pulses agonisingly along, reaching the mediaeval bridge of
Montalbán. Standing on this bridge, the stillness in the air is pierced
by shrieks from a nearby slaughterhouse, and the polluted river turns
from brown to red. Amid the stench, storks retrieve unidentifiable things
from the water. Witnessing this stretch, through what is seen and smelt,
the river is embodied within myself. I react, rejecting these senses. They
inform an ambivalent subjectivity, where I directly experience and feel
attachment to the river while simultaneously feeling disconnected to its
rural stretches by virtue of my identification as both urban and foreign.
This then informs a personal politics that is inspired by how the river
is in other stretches—clear, flowing, rich. Following Barad’s (2007)
intra-action, this subjectivity is an example of material and discursive co-
constitution with the river, and also a reflection of the entanglement
of senses, location and material informing this politics (Neimanis 2012,
2013; Singh 2013).
The river regains its waters from the canal and flows onto Talavera de
la Reina. Irrigation communities here sprung up after the Spanish Civil
War using water from the Alberche River. Yet even this tributary of the
Tagus suffers from low flow due to a transfer of its headwaters to Madrid.
The river ran dry here in 2006.
The Tagus river runs its course from the region of Castille la Mancha
and into Extremadura, where hydroelectric power reigns supreme. The
river becomes a series of reservoirs, inundating villages while ancient
Roman temples sit atop the view. It receives most of its flow from
tributaries. Irrigation associations were created during the Francoist dicta-

torship, despite low yields since the soil is poor. This was described as a
policy of internal colonisation. Even here, the river has its more-than-
human witnesses in areas where it flows unimpeded, with hundreds of
vultures flying above it in Monfragüe. Yet, the human persists. The river
is held in reservoirs throughout this region to ensure that treaty-bound
2,700 hm3 per year of water are given over the border into Portugal
(Escudero Gómez & Martín Trigo, 2020).
But what of the Tagus’ waters that flow in the other direction, towards
the Levant and the Mediterranean? After the transfer, it mixes with that
of the Jucar and Segura Rivers and is spread out along irrigation channels
from the Murcia region to the provinces of Alicante and Almeria. When
reaching intensely irrigated fields, it is further mixed with groundwater,
desalinated water, and treated wastewater, flooded across fields or dripped
through plastic pipes, becoming the subject of conflicts over water and
farmland (Greenpeace, 2017), and discourse over regional rights to the
Tagus. Some of it seeps across the region and into the Mar Menor salt-
water lagoon, increasingly afflicted by processes of eutrophication, before
entering the Mediterranean. Some also reach the last stretch of the Segura
River where it supplies centenary irrigation institutions, which trace their
origins to medieval Muslim Spain. For them, their canals hold live and
dead water5 depending on its location within the irrigation network. Irri-
gation farmers on both ends of the transfer embody divergent narratives
over how the waters of the Tagus are best used—whether for intensive
and modern forms of irrigated agriculture, or to see its waters as live or
dead depending on the canal it flows within. The Tagus then becomes
entangled with the European polity as it becomes embodied in the fruits
and vegetables that are exported throughout Europe.
Conflicting Meanings and Contradictions of Interdependent Waters

The Tagus exemplifies the meeting of multiple discourses, social and
material relationships and embodied subjectivities across many hydroso-
cial territories formed by water transfers. The river and its tributaries
5 “Live” water is water that is brought into fields to irrigate them via canals from
a source (river, spring, well) while “dead” water is collected from fields after irrigation
into canals (Morales Gil et al., 2005). Dead water can be reutilized further downstream
(becoming live again) or is brought back into a river.
are a living, historical and contemporary relationship between humans

and more-than-humans, the living and the deceased, the material and
the discursive. As Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argues, material practices
and ethical dispositions are inseparable, but at the same time they are
non-innocent. Multiple conflicting meanings of water, as resource or
ecosystem, and the aesthetics and emotions ascribed to it, ranging from
pride to sadness to anger, envelop and co-constitute what is a deceiv-
ingly simple word, river. The politics of interdependency with water,
illuminated in these often-contradictory meanings and relations with the
river, enables us to reconsider the more-than-human as active beings in
what is considered ethical practice, rather than as simply subjects of ethics
(Plumwood, 2012).
By highlighting my own relationship and partial understanding of
the river, I recognise my own affects and emotions in my personal
history, giving due respect to other subjects inhabiting and living with
the same river. This requires looking at how capturing emotional commu-
nication between human and more-than-humans takes place (González-
Hidalgo & Zografos, 2019), and similarly, understanding the politics of
subjects’ own understanding of how they care for the same shared river
and believe that their actions are “life affirming” (Singh 2013, p. 190).
In this respect, the Tagus can be conceived as a tortured example
of a conflict between different understandings of Singh’s life affirma-
tive actions that spills out and creates multiple waters—urban wastewater,
ecosystem water, potential energy water—within a river, and in turn spills
onto other more-than-humans—soils, cities, energy systems—that cross
multiple scales. Activists denounce the water transfer to Spain’s levant
as ecologically crippling, while irrigation farmers in the levant as well as
in the Tagus basin are upset by being cast as abusers of the river, while
they provide food to millions. Water connects the human scale to all
other scales of life (Neimanis, 2012). Recounting the complexity of the
Tagus’s multi-scalar nodes helps record what polluting activities and those
in positions of power have done to territories, humans and more-than-
humans as well as the unequal impacts of these actions. Recording and
narrating illuminates these stories and histories into contemporary poli-
tics, thereby giving possibilities for different directions of political action
in the constant co-becoming with the river.
With my partial understanding of the Tagus, I draw out the strug-
gles for dominance and memories of different versions of the Tagus. My
telling casts a new light on how activists, irrigation farmers, politicians and
civil servants fight over articulating different meanings of life-giving and

taking on the river, who is the true steward of water and therefore of land
and territory, and who is safe-guarding (human and more-than-human)
life (Singh, 2013). This problematizes the hydrosocial territory perspec-
tive (Boelens et al., 2016); from a partial and situated understanding, I
trace part of the webs of relations among identified subjects—myself, my
family, farmers, activists—as co-constituting material flows. Yet the webs
of relations are never fully knowable.
Similarly, the fight among actors articulating different meanings is also
an exclusionary fight over subjective human values that often affords
little compromise. Recognising other value systems allows me to judge
what and how other human and more-than-human subjects are valued,
and requires me to choose with who/what and how I want to belong
(Rowe, 2005). It also forces me to identify the consequences of other
value systems, their material and discursive articulations, which lead
to outcomes that go against my own ethics of more-than-human life.
Belonging is invariably nested in divergent and conflicting understand-
ings of territories, the subjects within, and the forces that subjectify.
A more-than-human co-becoming sees me/us as interdependent, even
if this interdependence is anything but innocent, and the river carries
the consequences of this relational web (Neimanis, 2012) as nitrites and
ammonia.
I as researcher co-become (Bawaka Country et al., 2013) with the
Tagus as I write the interdependent histories and relationships of the
multiple human subjects constantly relating with the Tagus as more-than-
human. That this co-becoming is fraught also shows how “Country” is
not innocent; rather, it can support and harm life, reflecting flows of
power that are multifaceted and consequential for subjects and ecolo-
gies (Nightingale, 2011; Swyngedouw, 1999). My own experience and
memory inform my situated politics. Interdependency and co-becoming
with the Tagus is relational; it is a political and ethical positioning of
the self vis-à-vis the more-than-human river, and against socionatural
articulations that subject it and us to exclusionary and oppressive ways
of living. The smell of ammonia is a testament to, and result of, the
uneven politics that co-constitutes the Tagus, and a call for rethinking the
ethical implications of interdependent embodied subjectivities of/with the
Tagus.
Ethics of More-Than-Human Interdependencies

These situated narratives of co-becoming with water illustrate the politics
of interdependencies and their ethical implications. The ebbs and flows of
the Tagus River are implicated in the lives and deaths, the thriving and
suffering of people and more-than-humans, all of whom shape the fluid
waterscapes of the river both materially and discursively. In Pravah, Sakar-
bai’s water has turned “bad” and the tap water has health implications for
human and more-than-human beings who use it. Despite this, there are
benefits from the use of wastewater. Flowing with the increased, more
reliable water supply are economic and social benefits for many in the
farming communities. The multiplicity of different waters in both cases
are therefore infused with ethics through their situated more-than-human
interdependency. Rather than being considered moral or immoral, these
relationships with multiple waters are understood and experienced as part
of wider webs of ethical significance in everyday life (Puig de la Bellacasa,
2017). The co-mingling of pasts, presents and potential futures in such
waterscapes is therefore also knotted with ethical relations that inform
ways of living with the multiplicity of water as it moves, laden with power,
through lands, bodies and infrastructures (Rose, 2012). These illustra-
tions of more-than-human interdependencies demonstrate that rather
than occurring in an “encounter”, interdependencies are always ethical
because they emerge through relational assemblages; entangled lives carry
responsibility to others, giving both life and death.
When ethics are understood in this way, as enmeshed in multi-species
everyday practices, embodied engagement within the world, and more-
than-human relational knowledge formation (Richardson-Ngwenya &
Nightingale, 2018), this legitimises and makes necessary an acknowl-
edgement of more-than-human interdependencies as crucial to the main-
tenance of life (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Drawing on the work of
Levinas and his student Hatley, feminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose
(2012) exemplifies the workings of more-than-human ethical relations
by extending the idea of ecological relationality beyond spatially config-
ured power dynamics and locating ethics in time, a move which helps
deepen the ethical and justice dimensions of the two water narratives
here. Mobilising the work of ecologists on “flying foxes and their co-
evolved myrtaceous mutualists”, Rose (2012, p.135) argues that the webs
of mutualism that occur between the myrtaceous trees and flowers which
attract flying foxes, who in turn assist in the pollination of various wood-
land and rainforest species, can be understood as ethical in that they
maintain each other, themselves and their future “selves” or generations
(see also Zwarteveen & Boelens, 2014 and their conceptualisation of
‘socio-ecological justice’). Ethics becomes the ontological condition of
the ebb and flow of life and death; it is a responsibility, or maintenance
of life, between different beings.
These insights bring us to questions of care and responsibilities once
we have narrated co-becomings such as those above. What Rose (2012,
p.136) terms “multispecies knots of ethical time” are the intertwined
histories, presents and futures that are embodied in the practices of species
as they move through the world. This ethical intertwining of bodies and
ecologies over time and space relates to the feminist stance on the ethics
of care as “a vital interweaving web of life” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017,
p. 4). Following Tronto (2015), Puig de la Bellacasa (2017, p. 6), main-
tains a distinction between ethical dispositions and material practices while
calling for them to be considered inseparable. In doing so she articulates
more-than-human interdependency as an ethics of care:
[…]‘ethics’ in an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral

obligations but rather about thick, impure, involvement in a world where
the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes ethics a
hands-on, ongoing process of recreation of ‘as well as possible’ relations
and therefore one that requires speculative opening about what a possible
involves [...] unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness.
Thinking of ethics as embodied and situated, helps to decentre the

human, and therefore moral discourse, in more-than-human interdepen-
dencies. As a speculative politics, this ethics of care is “non-innocent”,
meaning it is both troubled by its situatedness and co-constituted through
complex more-than-human intra-action (Barad, 2007). In Pravah this
manifests in the way the wastewaterscape and its social, economic and
embodied consequences cause harm as well as material benefits, a contra-
diction that plays out as women farmers navigate the different scales
of the wastewaterscape in everyday life. These ambiguities are further
exemplified in the paper by Bawaka Country and colleagues (2013),
where they reconceptualise natural resource management through the
Aboriginal indigenous ontology of co-becoming. Wetj, a practice of recip-
rocal sharing, care and “intra-action” (Barad, 2007) between all beings,
“...springs from and supports a Yolŋu ontology of co-becoming which

sees all beings, including human beings, as coming into existence through
relationships” (Bawaka Country et al., 2013, p. 187). Or in other words,
beings “only exist, be-come vibrant, powerful and important, through
relationships” (ibid., 2013, p. 189). They demonstrate how the perspec-
tive and meaning of natural resource management changes when agency
and communicative status is given to Country. Rather than assuming
humans as the primary care-givers and care-takers of Country, the main-
tainers of morality, Country is seen as a sentient, multifaceted assemblage
of beings that sometimes cares for humans and non-humans, sometimes
harms, but is always interdependent, in a mutual, relational co-becoming.
As narrated above, the entangled waterscapes of the Tagus demonstrate
the ways that water as an ambiguous care-giver and care-taker of multiple
more-than-human assemblages, also engender a non-innocent process
of co-becoming. These often-contradictory relations of mutuality also
emerged clearly in the first section, as we unfolded how waters and
gendered subjectivities co-constitute one another—or intra-act—in the
wastewaterscape of Pravah in ambiguous, non-innocent ways.
If ethics are embedded in the everyday life of all beings, which unfolds
over and through diverse temporalities (Rose, 2012) and socionatural
flows of power (Nightingale, 2011), the multiplicity and mobilities of
water as it percolates through rocks, soils and bodies, is itself ethically
infused. The complexity of ethics within this wider frame of “multispecies
knots” cannot therefore be reduced to analysis of a particular encounter
between “human” faces, nor as Barbara Davy (2007) argues, the require-
ment of human recognition or legitimisation of the other that this
moment implies. The waters of Pravah and the Tagus, in their multiple
forms, both continuously enable and disable life; they both take and give
life (Bawaka Country et al., 2013). Therefore, to build on Rose’s (2012)
and Davy’s (2007) arguments, ethics, we suggest, are provoked, but not
through a particular encounter between knowing ethical selves. Rather
ethical relations emerge through dwelling within more-than-human inter-
dependencies.6 Thinking with the waters of Pravah and the Tagus
demonstrates the uneven politics of dwelling within more-than-human
interdependencies. Teasing out the ways in which water entangles humans
6 For further discussion on the more-than-human politics of dwelling see Tim Ingold
(2005).
enables us to think beyond human-centric ethical practices and implica-

tions, and to conceive of ethics as embedded within the co-constitution
of embodied subjectivities, within processes of more-than-human co-
becoming, creating for us new questions about interdependencies, caring
and the kinds of narratives we tell about those co-becomings.
Conclusions
In this chapter we have explored different ways of grappling with the
more-than-human, focusing on the politics of interdependencies through
situated entanglements with water. We have done so by juxtaposing
two cases that are geographically distant and working on different
scales of operation. Human-water relations in the village of Pravah, in
Maharashtra, and the flow of the Tagus River, in Spain, shape differen-
tiated and ever-changing embodied subjectivities (including those of the
researchers): a process of co-becoming that has specific implications for
how we understand and engage with more-than-human interdependen-
cies and therefore ethics.
Drawing on FPE and other allied disciplines, we started our journey
of grappling with the more-than-human by acknowledging the impor-
tance of unpacking nature/society binaries, the symbolic and material
boundaries that maintain them and the power dynamics in which they
are enrolled. We thus framed more-than-human interdependencies from
an understanding of relationality as entangled, multiple and situated
(Nightingale, 2011; Rowe, 2005). Understood as interdependent and
entangled, the more-than-human forces us to look beyond distinct indi-
viduals, supposedly separate from ecologies and other beings. Therefore,
it becomes important to attend to the specific and situated characteristics
of such relations as the basis for theorising. To unpack these characteristics
of more-than-human interdependency, we found it useful to interweave
FPE with STS and post-human scholarship: it helped us attend to the
specific affordances of water (water percolates, contaminates, transports
sediments and algae, etc.), which play a role in shaping differentiated
gendered embodied subjectivities and, conversely, how water is signified.
Two main points emerged as we walked through Pravah with women
farmers and along the flows of the Tagus River. Firstly, more-than-
human relations, and especially human-water relations, are ambiguous,
troubling and never innocent. They create differentiated possibilities of
well-being and illness, both for human and more-than-human actors.
Secondly, as the authors, we actively co-enact the more-than-human rela-

tions we describe and theorise about. And this has ethical and political
implications, not least because what we can say about the more-than-
human is always partial, mediated by the social, by our (human) ways of
making sense of the world. For instance, the focus on the interdepen-
dency of women farmers and (waste)water in Pravah is a specific political
choice to challenge the processes through which experiences of women
farmers from multiple castes, their knowledges and practices in relation to
(waste)water, are marginalised and/or silenced; and to interweave femi-
nist struggles with environmental concerns in Maharashtra. The story of
the Tagus takes on a different positionality, embodied within the hydroso-
cial territory it narrates. The process of knowing and becoming with the
Tagus invariably collides with other divergent forms of co-becoming that
create an emotional and sensorial rejection of processes that make specific
territories. Nonetheless this same process also informs a situated politics,
one which demands an acknowledgement of how everyone and every-
thing that is part of the more-than-human co-become in ways that defy
anthropocentric modes of (dis)ordering the world (Halberstam, 2020).
This chapter therefore illuminates the ways water relations are ethically
infused processes of co-becoming. In illustrating the emergent ambiguity
of more-than-human interdependency, the chapter contributes to trou-
bling the neat moral boundaries that constrain the multiplicity of more-
than-human ethical relations within spheres of privileged human moral
reasoning (Richardson-Ngwenya & Nightingale, 2018; Tronto, 1993).
Through highlighting the politics of interdependencies that animate the
multiple waters along the Tagus and in Pravah, and exploring our own
role as researchers in the narration of such, we have also sought to ques-
tion the nature of ethics as something bounded by human reason. These
particular narrations of co-becoming with water highlight the impor-
tance of empirically unpacking the complexity of embodied waters and
how they shape not only economic and agricultural possibilities, but
also every day, embodied senses of well-being, illness and change in
contemporary waterscapes. Exploring more-than-human relations there-
fore involves thinking with the situatedness and embodiment of such
relations, thus revealing the ways in which power flows and plays across
what often appear as distinct bodies, spheres or scales. In doing so, these
intersecting relations and an understanding of our own entanglement
in them as researchers, contributes to FPE, STS and philosophies that
seek to disorder or blur the boundaries that constrain life and deeper
understandings of its more-than-human interdependencies.
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holder.
CHAPTER 7
Meanings and Practices of Care in Feminist

Political Ecology: An Intergenerational
Conversation with Khayaat Fakier
and Wendy Harcourt
Marlene Gómez, Anna Katharina Voss, and Eoin Farrelly
Introduction
This wide-ranging conversation circles around meanings of care from
different academic disciplines as well as feminist activist practices in order
to sketch out some of the diverse understandings of care in feminist
M. Gómez (B) · A. K. Voss · E. Farrelly

E. Farrelly
Department of Sociology & Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo,
Norway
A. K. Voss
International Institute of Social Studies, The Netherladns & Fondazione Pangea
Onlus, Italy, The Hague, The Netherlands

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_7
156 M. GÓMEZ ET AL.
political ecology (FPE). The intergenerational conversation is based on

questions posed by Marlene, Anna and Eoin, all early career scholars,
to Khayaat and Wendy, two teachers and writers who have long been
engaged in FPE, one in the Global South and the other in the Global
North. Both Khayaat and Wendy have been involved in feminist activism
as well as academic institutions and come from different academic entry
points to care. The conversation touches on how care has different mean-
ings according to disciplines and experience. It looks at meanings of
care from diverse scholarly positions—from feminist economics, sociology,
critical development studies, queer ecology and decolonial approaches—
in order to consider how FPE research and teaching can be done with
care. The responses of the two scholars to the questions posed suggest
the ways in which different meanings of care across generations filter into
FPE from both a personal and political perspective—including Khayaat
and Wendy’s unique way of practising a feminist ethics of care in the
classroom. While the conversation is only able to partially cover the
importance of care to FPE, it sets out some of the basic questions that
FPE scholars continue to ask about the politics and ethics of care towards
the human and the more-than-human. We have tried to signpost the
different threads in the conversation through sub-titles to help the reader
follow how the conversation moved.
Positioning the Conversation

Marlene: As feminist political ecology (FPE) scholars, how do you relate
to the different meanings and practices of care?
Khayaat: I relate to care at different levels, from my position as a
scholar but also as an engaged human being in society and social move-
ments. As an FPE scholar, I relate to care as a concept developed in
feminist literature which raises the questions: How do we value care?
Who conducts care? Who should be responsible for care? How do we
look at care in public and private institutions? How does care play out
in communal activities and as a public good? FPE values care as a funda-
mental need of humans and societies since we cannot flourish without
care. Thus, care encompasses diverse activities including the values that
support our mental and political health for social development and the
responsibility we have to care for human and more-than-human others so
that we may stop thinking of the planet merely as a container of resources.
7 MEANINGS AND PRACTICES OF CARE IN FEMINIST … 157
We need to look at what we consume and how we interact with each other
and understand care as an ethical practice.
The big question is: what is sufficient for us to live? People experience
wide disparities in access to resources and in their experience of suffi-
ciency and replenishment. The relations we have with resources need to
be transformed and rebuilt from an ethical practice of care, where care is
understood as a fundamental need, value, and activity. I relate to care not
only as a concept to study but also as a practice. A care-full practice means
that we need to pay close attention to the needs of others and the impact
of our actions in our everyday life as well as in our research methodolo-
gies. Another important aspect is to avoid extractivism of epistemologies
and ontologies. Doing research from an ethics of care involves thinking
of research as a process of collaboration with the research participants as
well as one’s interaction with peers and negotiation with people in power,
inside and outside the academy.
Wendy: As a feminist political ecologist I relate to care, like Khayaat,
in various ways. Here I would like to highlight five. First, I relate to care
as a principle of how I live my life, thinking through how I care for and
with others, retrieving Tronto’s (1993) debate on “caring with others”.
This is still an ongoing process through which I am learning individually
and with others. I seek to be always aware of my positionality, specifically
my race, age and educated class privileges.
Second, we need to discuss the politics of care, which determine who
is able to care for whom. In this regard, I edited a book with Christine
Bauhardt that built both on feminist political ecology and feminist polit-
ical economy, examining the politics of care from these two similar but
different viewpoints. In the book we look at how the concept of care is
not just related to social reproduction but also to caring with more-than-
human others and for the planet. There were several interesting tensions
around how feminist economists understand care (how to measure the
importance of care work) in contrast to feminist ecologists (how to under-
stand relations of care with humans and more than human others)—this
is an important debate within feminist theory and practice.
A third important area where I have learnt about care is in conver-
sations around degrowth, where care is seen as a value that can displace
economic growth and greed. Engaging with degrowth reflects my lifelong
personal, political, and academic struggle with economists and traditional
views on economics, since care as a value requires a very different under-

standing of the economy, labour and intersectional determinants—care is
relational and complex.
Fourth, I see care as needing to embrace the more-than-human.
Personally, that is difficult as I live in an urban context, embedded in
Western-centric, Eurocentric, and human-centric dynamics. So, while I
am fascinated by the theory of the more-than-human and how we are
entangled in multispecies interactions, in practice I need to be more hands
on how to care for more-than-human others. I love to be in nature,
but at the same time, I feel at a loss when faced with the harshness of
what is happening to our environment with climate change and ecolog-
ical destruction. When we talk about care for the more-than-human, I
know we need to go beyond the image of nature somewhere out there
and admit how enmeshed we are in our environment. But in the end what
I feel is an unease at caring with and for nature. What does it really mean,
personally and collectively, to resist climate change and other socio-natural
disasters and crises, particularly as someone living in urban environments?
What kind of socionatures do I inhabit and shape?
Finally, coming from Australia as a white settler feminist, I am trying to
understand the meaning of caring for Country (a term from Indigenous
Australia). Living in Italy and working in The Netherlands since my late
20s, I have lived far away from Australia, but I am shaped by that history.
Every visit, I see changes to non-Indigenous Australian politics as more
people (mostly on the left) become aware of what Indigenous knowledges
can teach them about their environment and the damage white settler
life has done. I feel there is much more learning needed if there is to
be a meaningful dialogue across race, class and gender around Country.
As an ally to Indigenous Australians, I want to learn more about care
with Country, even if I am mostly only able to engage virtually and via
translation.
Different Understandings
of Care in Academic Debates
Marlene: What are the different understandings of care in feminist and
environmental justice literature and what are the contradictions?
Khayaat: It is important to understand how sociologists, feminist
economists, development scholars, and others look at care, including in
terms of the differences among literatures. The difference sometimes lies
in how and where we place the emphasis when analysing a problem. If

one looks at the sociological literature, the attempt to understand care
mostly comes from questioning who and what needs care and who and
what conducts care, a perspective found mostly in a sociohistorical and
economic approach.
Feminists working on care, such as Jody Heymann (2007), Bridget
Anderson (2021), and others look at care as a human concern through
the study of maternity. Their work disrupts the idea of a “universal need
for care” through looking at class differences and how they shape global
care chains. Through looking at care from a social class perspective, femi-
nist economists and development scholars, such as Nancy Folbre (1995,
2014) and Shahra Razavi (2011a), look at the institutions of care; that is
who cares and who benefits from care. Other scholars look at care from
an interdisciplinary perspective, looking mostly at how care relations are
found among people and the environment in everyday life. Wendy’s work
comes to mind (2009, 2017), and also Jacklyn Cock’s (2021) and Nora
Rathzel’s (Räthzel & Uzzell, 2019), scholars I have worked with that
develop an approach to care for the environment. Although these scholars
work on the topic of care, there are many contradictions and tensions in
their literature that are visible in how they include intersectional issues of
race, class, gender, sexual orientation as well as the roles that the envi-
ronment and social justice movements play. In my own work, I try to
be more eclectic and therefore more pragmatic. If we’re talking about,
for instance, the survival of humans and more-than-humans, we need
an interdisciplinary approach. We need to work with the contradictions
and broaden the dialogue across academic literatures as well as listen to
ways of understanding the world outside the canon of academia. We iden-
tify these tensions in those who focus on state-centric approaches versus
those who take a bottom-up approach and are critical of the state, instead
looking to social movements. It is not that one is right and the other
wrong; they both have something important to say about the politics of
care. We need to bring those perspectives together and work through the
contradictions.
Wendy: I am thinking on similar lines to Khayaat about the need
to see what different disciplines offer, and how FPE offers a trans-
disciplinary approach to care. Feminists, whether working in sociology,
economics or development studies, examine who is doing the care, for
whom and where. What is important is that their studies make care
visible and underline how care is crucial to keep our lifeworld going.
Economists like Folbre (1994) have asked who cares for the kids and
shows how economies need to recognise that reproductive work under-
scores all productive activity. Razavi’s work in gender and development
has produced her model of the care diamond (2007) which conceptu-
alises how the provision of care includes the family/household, markets,
the public sector and the not-for-profit sector (including voluntary and
community provision). Both argue that care (whether paid or unpaid) is
crucial to human well-being and to social and economic development, as
part of the fabric of society. Feminist economists underline it is important
not only to count and measure care but to change economic thinking to
revalue care work as crucial to the economy. In another important theo-
retical move, they also invite us to go beyond household chores to see
love and emotions as crucial to everyday life and survival.
Feminist ecologists, on the other hand, speak about care for nature
and environmental justice. They critique environmentalists’ focus on
conserving biodiversity as more important than peoples’ habitats. As
ecofeminists have stated, the question is not are we too many but why
are we too greedy? The relationship between population and environment
is a complex and passionate debate among ecologists and economists.
Haraway’s rallying cry “make kin not babies” proposes that we consider
the population question in a different way—not about numbers and
scarcity of resources but about the importance of care for more-than-
human relations (see the chapter on population in this book). Studies on
gender relations and biodiversity by Joni Seager (1993) for example also
show the importance of gender, environment and gender relations. She
points to the gendered division of knowledge and labour demonstrated
through women in different cultures knowing and caring for particular
plants and animals. FPE scholars Christa Wichterich and Giovanna Di
Chiro have also looked at care in relation to global care chains, environ-
mental concerns around the green economy, and in relation to degrowth
(see Chapter 8 on degrowth in this book).
One way to do care-full research is to open up academia to different
forms of knowledge through storytelling. Telling stories about how we
live with more-than-human others builds on oral traditions. Powerful
origin stories remove the dominant western narrative of rational “eco-
nomic” man and ask us to listen to the more-than-human, paying atten-
tion to how humanity is embedded in nature, entangled with the land,
water, forests. Post-development scholars like Arturo Escobar (2020)
speak of the pluriverse (rather than universe) to recognise the many ways
of knowing, and thinking-feeling or sentipensar, as key to knowledge

production. Telling stories about the history of place, how place evolves
and how we feel and sense those changes, help us to envisage a pluriversal
rather than a single, hegemonic story of progress, modernity and devel-
opment. The historical and ongoing stories of violence in colonial and
post-colonial societies in white settler countries and the Global South
illustrate how colonial rule and global neoliberal capitalism have not only
led to human suffering and exploitation but also planetary suffering. We
have created life-worlds that fail to care for people or for the planet:
climate crisis, flooding, fires, that make life unliveable. Indeed, sometimes
it seems like a form of revenge by the Earth. That might sound extreme
and emotional, but I think we do need to add to rational, scientific, and
measured analysis the deeper reasons for what is causing our collective
fear in order to learn how to care in a more holistic way. If we stay with
our emotions and fears and begin to tell other, more meaningful stories
about care we might learn to position care at the centre of our lives and
move away from the violence of extractivist Eurocentric technoscience.
Learning About Care in Different Social Contexts

Anna: Thank you both for taking our readers on such a nuanced journey
through the complexity of understandings of care, and in pointing out
how FPE and kindred social sciences are asking uncomfortable questions
and unpacking our individual and societal conditioning. Challenging our
anthropocentric worldviews can be unsettling and requires humility. But
the curiosity to (re)learn other ways of inhabiting the planet also opens up
fascinating paths to a more embodied awareness of our more-than-human
interdependence. The slogan “We are not defending nature, we are nature
defending itself”, endorsed by Indigenous environmental activists comes
to my mind here.
Khayaat: When I was thinking about this discussion, I was thinking
about embodiment and a very visceral experience of care when we become
disconnected from our relation to the more-than-human. I agree with
Wendy, we are experiencing a very violent embodiment of a disconnec-
tion among the human and more-than-human. If one looks at nutrition
levels in South Africa, there is violence due to malnutrition, with people
slowly starving. That has a very real embodied impact. The latest research,
influenced by COVID-19, is that nearly 30% of children under the age of
five in South Africa are malnourished. Not caring for the environment has
a physical impact on bodies, as well as mental, social and emotional devel-

opment. In South Africa a disregard for the impact of extractivism (such
as mining and industrial agriculture) on the soil, climate and ecology
of food production breaks the caring connections between humans and
non-human-others. Not only does this affect the diversity and avail-
ability of food and result in under-or malnutrition, but care for the
environment is also displaced, and humans become alienated from their
more-than-human others.
This is quite significant in South Africa, which is seen as the most devel-
oped country on the African continent. South Africa used to be the food
basket of the world, but now it holds out begging bowls. One of the
important reasons is the influence of industrial agriculture on the coun-
try’s ability to feed its own people. We need to talk about a care crisis
in relation to industrial agriculture, civil war, the displacement of people
and the development of crops which are grown for export rather than
feeding people. In our economic growth-driven world, commodities are
more important than the sustenance of people. A lack of care by govern-
ments leads to a lack of focus on inequality and equal access to nutrition,
and to the poor physical health and growth of children, as well as rise
of obesity, which goes hand-in-hand with under-nutrition and malnutri-
tion. We need to understand how industrial development processes lead
to industrial enclosures, as well as what Wendy mentions: how conserva-
tion practices forcibly remove people from their land and stop them from
growing their own food or producing food for their country.
These processes of modern enclosure, led by massive industrial forms
of production, have also led to an urban bias in policymaking. The
creation of a modernised, urban, city dweller,—the industrial labourer or a
professionalised worker—is reflected in a rural-urban imbalance. Through
the modern development process, citizens are increasingly divorced from
an embodied sensory engagement with nature. The modern citizen is
removed and remote from nature, an individual whose aspirations, work
and sensory experience no longer relate to the more-than-human. We
need to regain those relations if we are to find sufficiency.
Marlene: I agree with Wendy that storytelling is important. Her ques-
tions around which stories we want to hear, what we want to tell, and
who is able to tell these stories are crucial. Storytelling is at the core of
a feminist practice, and we need to consider this when thinking about
our responses to government policies and responsibilities. We have to be
mindful that practices of care take place beyond households and are found
in our everyday life and at other scales. The question is, how can we
translate practices of care into public policies? What are the core points
we should need to tackle if we want to ensure policies of care at local,
regional, worldwide levels?
Khayaat: When we talk about social policy, we need to think about
different aspects: industrial policy, labour policy and environmental policy.
Care in South Africa depends on women’s volunteer work: women
perform vital work in caring for the environment, in caring for orphans,
for the disabled and for others. Even if paid, they receive an amount which
they can hardly survive on, nor can they afford to train themselves to
adequately care for the ill, for example, people living with HIV/AIDS,
never mind finding out how to practise self-care.
Policy in the Global South looks very different from social policy in
the Global North. Reflecting on what Wendy said about Razavi’s care
diamond, feminist policy must be about recognising the value that care
has for society as a public good, and as a commons. Razavi (2011b) makes
a distinction between what happens in the Global South compared to the
Global North. Women in the Global North, especially in social demo-
cratic welfare states, have been able to develop careers in care, be paid and
become emancipated both socially and economically, because the work
that they were doing was recognised. This is very different from having
care conducted by (women) volunteers. Care work is seen as a side line,
even a form of charity. What I would argue is that care should be at the
centre of industrial policy and labour policy. When we make social policy
about industrial relations and labour conditions, we need to include an
understanding of how care for human others and for the environment fit
into such policies.
In the Global South, volunteers who are in public works programs are
rarely being paid a liveable wage for the very valuable work that they do.
What kind of policy could evolve that takes into account better pay and
conditions for them? UN Women and the Commission on the Status of
Women do take up these concerns in the multilateral space, but it is not
a space which is easily accessible to most Global South women, activists
or social movements. The value and recognition of care need to emerge
from national contexts, where feminist movements put pressure on states
by bringing building policy change from the bottom up.
Politicising Our Understandings of Care

Eoin: If care is conceptualised at the global level or scale, what polit-
ical challenges do you anticipate? How do you suggest they would be
navigated and overcome? As we conduct this interview, the international
community is preoccupied with the Russian invasion of Ukraine—this is
just one example of changing priorities shifting the international agenda
away from other global concerns. How could this impact interventions
that move towards environmental justice?
Wendy: It is probably rather early to reflect on the impact of the
Russian war in Ukraine on global politics. But in terms of the everyday
responses to the war in Europe, like in the first wave of COVID, people
want to do something to show they care. Many European cities have seen
demonstrations, collections of clothes and food and money. Many individ-
uals have invited refugees into their home. Even racialized students who
did not get the same official support felt students acted in solidarity with
them. I think there is a strong sense of caring and solidarity expressed. It
comes down to the interesting question of how transnational you can be
and whether acting in place is the way to show real care.
On the other hand, at least for those who have access to media and
social media in the West, we see how our fears are individualised as people
speak of the rise in mental illness. Even the energy crisis (due to war or
climate change) is put in terms of the energy bills individuals will pay
and the impacts of inflation on European lives. Caring about keeping
European consumer rights without a sense of what larger environmental
justice concerns are determining the price rises is not the care we are
talking about. We need to shift from conceptualising just ourselves to
care with responsibility and with others and feeling that, collectively, we
have the agency to do something about it. This type of mental shift will
be important if care is really to become central to global approaches to
the economy, politics, health and the environment.
Anna: I agree, the question of how to make this shift of values happen
is deeply urgent. And as Wendy just mentioned, we need to take into
account the role of the media. What makes it to the headlines—whether
it is war, or social and economic violence in general, the ongoing envi-
ronmental collapse or the impact of the pandemic—reflects the absence of
care for our planetary well-being. I often feel the tension between falling
into despair about the present and what-is-yet-to-come, and at the same
time keeping hope that changes are happening at institutional levels and
in small, everyday actions of care and solidarity.
Khayaat: I think Wendy is correct in saying that it is a bit early to
reflect on what is happening now in Ukraine because of the invasion of
Russia. But it is interesting to reflect on what happened during COVID;
a situation which was so new to all of us. It cut us off from our normal
forms of organising, protesting and engaging with the world because of
lockdown restrictions. Especially in South Africa, we couldn’t even go
outside to exercise, you were limited to your house, in whatever form
that took, for several months. Those circumstances amplified the need
for care. People wanted to provide care generously even at the cost of
their own health. Some women’s movements of community-based carers
continued to look after other people in their communities, despite the
restrictions on their movements. They battled to be defined as essential
workers. Even if they weren’t paid, they didn’t forget the struggle to be
recognised and to be valued. They still protested and marched, despite the
regulations that people couldn’t gather and people couldn’t be outside in
public.
What I learnt from them was how important it was that they stuck to
their values, remembering for whom and why they are organising. That is
a very small example, and I certainly don’t want to extrapolate it to other
contexts, but I think it has a strong message about not losing sight of the
value of what movements are doing.
Queer Ecology and Care Otherwise…

Marlene: Talking about the way we engage with the world and also the
diverse imaginaries and knowledges we have, I want to raise the topic of
queer ecologies. We know that both academic and activist spaces develop
diverse proposals to mitigate and tackle the ecological crisis, but these
proposals often are heteronormative or they overlook sexual or gender
diversities. In this regard, and thinking from a queer ecology perspective,
what role should sexual gender diversities play in building a practice of
care to contest the ecological crisis we are currently living in?
Wendy: Queer ecology challenges heteronormativity on different
levels, it is not just about heterosexual expression and marriage as the
norm, it is also about diverse bodies and understanding of different
forms of love. Queer ecologists such as Catriona Sandliands (2010) and
Greta Gaard (2011) and queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2020) are
asking us to recognize that in different species there are many ways of

loving and caring. Sex is not just about the male mating a female to
produce offspring. It is about fun, play and care with different part-
ners. Queering sexuality is not only about saying same sex is OK but
also about multiple patterns of relations and diverse forms of pleasure in
communities. Western science and economics have taught us that hetero-
sexuality is the dominant form, reducing love, desire and forms of care
for others into narrow heterosexual norms, fenced in by cultural and
legal restrictions. In addition, Indigenous writers, such as Kim TallBear
(2021) and Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2021), show how heteronorma-
tivity has been imposed through colonisation, suppressing the traditional
connections between the productive and reproductive sphere of land use.
Indigenous women have mobilised politically to protect and care for the
land, resisting colonial logics which disassociate people’s connectedness
to the earth. There are multiple genders and multiple ways of caring for
others in communities which are intergenerational and interspecies.
Queer ecology, then, offers us the possibility to consider different ways
of organising and thinking about how to care which go beyond hetero-
sexual relationships and nuclear families to embrace more-than-human
relations. However, in terms of the politics of care, challenging restric-
tive dominant western norms is difficult. Engaging in non-binary ways of
thinking means not othering bodies because they don’t have a particular
physical mobility, or sight, or hearing. Crip and queer studies recognise
there are many forms of bodies. They challenge us to consider the norms
and ensure that knowledge is produced in ways that recognize bodily
diversities.
It is difficult politics even within feminism. There are some feminists
who do not recognise trans women as women. So, in terms of care, it
is important to build culturally safe, secure spaces, where we can learn
and listen and build awareness of what it means to “other”. People are
going to make lots of mistakes because we’re brought up in a certain
way of understanding, but we need to hear and learn from diversity. This
also requires that we allow space for self-determination and demands for
autonomy. It is important to have spaces where people who have been
marginalised or othered come in and create trust with each other; spaces
where allies are invited in—or not.
Marlene: I totally agree, we all need to go deep in this discussion
and learn from diversity and the contestation of our privileges trying
to relate carefully with otherwise meanings (outside dominant racialised

Eurocentric norms and cis-hetero, able-bodied norms).
Eoin: I was thinking of how the concept of “otherwise” is one of
the central tenets of feminist political ecology, and how, as a network,
WEGO has been practising care and otherwise knowledges, whether we
are thinking otherwise, doing otherwise and imagining futures otherwise.
This strikes me as very compatible with the works of theorists such as Sara
Ahmed in her thoughts on queer phenomenology. Ahmed (2006) argues
that queerness disrupts and reorders social relations by not following
accepted paths. This queering or disorientation can put other objects
within reach that might not have at first glance seemed possible. I was
wondering what strikes you as an exciting challenge for feminist polit-
ical ecology and practices of care when engaging queer theory, or queer
ecology, in your own work?
Wendy: Thank you for bringing in the question of the otherwise, which
I have learnt from reading and listening to decolonial feminism, as well
as in the ideas of transgression or disruption central to queer theory. It
is exciting to consider how otherwise acknowledges the analytical impor-
tance of emotions and love, two concepts which have been traditionally
placed outside of academic study. I consider that the emotions of grief and
loss are at the centre of responses to climate crises, the COVID pandemic
and wars. The person who introduced me to queer ecology was Giovanna
Di Chiro (a member of WEGO and long-time friend). Di Chiro’s essay
on queering environmental discourse on toxic waters and Catriona Sandi-
land’s understanding of death and loss around AIDS were eye opening to
me about how to analyse emotions otherwise because their work allows
us to look at the validity of feeling grief and fear (Di Chiro, 2010; Sandi-
lands, 2010). The notion of otherwise also goes back to the importance
of storytelling. The power of poetry, visual arts, theatre and film are all
just as valid as academic texts in understanding how we care in the world.
Queer ecologies invite us to see the validity of imaginative and speculative
forms of knowledge (Haraway, 2016).
COVID has also disrupted our sense of the world, both in terms of
its embodied impact and how the pandemic changed our way of relating
to each other. The pandemic forced us to recognise how important care
for humans and more-than-humans is for our overall well-being, as well
as how we have come to exist and relate through a global digital world.
We’ve learned from that painful time that there is something possible that
can emerge in all those online conversations. To me that’s also queering,
disrupting the normal hierarchy of the academic text over other forms
of learning via experience. All of these video calls we’ve been involved
in have become part of the way we relate to the world too. While that
definitely needs more unpacking in terms of who profited from our digital
connectivity and who was included or excluded, global virtual technology
allowed us to connect and relate during Covid. Lastly, through otherwise
conversations, through feminist and queer intervention, we now bring our
passions, loves and fears into the academic world. When I was a student,
my sexuality, emotions and fears could not be brought into my work.
Now there is space to do so, even if it can be painful, and that to me is an
important step towards queering knowledge and creating different forms
of ecologies.
Practices of Care in Academe

Eoin: That was a really lovely intervention. I especially like what you said
at the end-that for something to be exciting it doesn’t have to be this
kind of joyful kind of engagement from the very start, it can germinate
through painful experiences. I’m wondering what role you think academia
can play in opening up space for nurturing practices of care. There seems
to be an obvious paradox. On the one hand, the assumption is that the
academy is a force for good; on the other hand, it is also part of the
problem, given the impact of the neoliberal university, the current mental
health crisis among graduate students and the challenges faced by first-
generation scholars, who are disproportionately Black students.
Khayaat: I think those are very important considerations, especially if
we are to meet the needs of first-generation students and students with
different abilities. And I want to pick up on what Wendy was saying about
queer ecology. She raises the notion of disruption as a way in which we
understand the world, the way in which we engage with the world. I
would point to the disruption of hierarchies which is necessary for a care-
full university or higher education system. One of the hierarchies is that
of age and the assumption that the person who enters the higher educa-
tion system is a blank slate with no previous knowledge or culture. The
kind of university I would like to see would open up and invert hierar-
chies in order to disrupt the boundaries or the constraints of who belongs
in the university and who does not. In the context of the South, univer-
sities are for a very select group of people who make it through a not
very supportive secondary education system and then find themselves at
a university.
We need to bring the university closer to those who cannot access it
through traditional meritocracy. Coming back to Wendy’s point about
stories and about recognition of the valuable caring activities which
already occur in the world, we need to learn from such otherwise visions
and aspirations of communities and social movements. We need to bring
those aspirations and stories about care much more into the university. I
would like to see the university as much more accessible. In our South
African context, just hosting a workshop with a social movement at a
university venue is quite significant for those movements. It is a recog-
nition by the tertiary education system that the work of the movement
is relevant. But the neoliberal university demands financial gain for every
activity, so it can be difficult to do such events, important as they are,
because movements cannot afford the venue hire.
At a personal level it is empowering for me to be in a classroom and
say, “I don’t know everything, but let’s come together and let’s talk about
what we can all contribute to this space”, because it is scary to be up
there as the all-knowing lecturer. So, for me, those disruptions to hier-
archy are exciting, and it is tremendously enriching as a so-called scholar
or academic to also be learning all the time. We need to think about our
pedagogies, how we value and recognize otherwise activities, in order to
develop a system of higher education which is more respectful and protec-
tive of human dignity, the dignity of its academic members, the dignity
of project, administrative and cleaning staff, and students.
If we recognise the cultural differences between first-generation
students, the differences of people from different racial backgrounds, we
could construct the architecture of our learning spaces as more inclusive.
I was shocked to see that people with disabilities cannot access the ISS
in the front entrance. There is a system of asking for the front desk to
help with a moveable ramp or to go to the back of the building. This
is stigmatising differently abled bodies. We also need to think about the
people that do the provisioning and cleaning in a university. They are
often racialised people. I see that also in my hotel in The Hague. For
universities to be caring places we need to reflect where our students are
from in the architecture, the food, the accommodation, as well as in our
pedagogy and in our learning materials. Similarly, curricula need to refer-

ence many different kinds of writing and resources. A question we could
ask ourselves is, how much does what we teach link with the experiences
of our students? Is there a proper representation of women writers, of
Black women writers from different places in the world?
Wendy: To follow on from Khayaat’s important observations of how
care should be expressed in universities, I would like to refer to my expe-
rience of teaching in ISS, a postgraduate school with people from all
over the world. Students are mostly people of privilege: even those who
access scholarships from rural institutions in the Global South. However,
coming to a European institution is unsettling and difficult, especially for
students who are newly or differently racialised in the Dutch context.
Over the 10 years I have been at ISS, I see how hard it is to be open
and create a safe space for people from very different contexts to learn
together. There is a major challenge to move beyond hierarchies both by
students and colleagues. I was very happy to disrupt hierarchies including
my own position as a white female professor.
I would like to mention three strategies which I think make univer-
sities more mindful of care. The first is mentoring. I’ve been mentored
by people of all ages when I joined academia as an older person at 52.
These are people who have really helped me work through the difficul-
ties of the university. Secondly is safety. My battle as a student was about
sexual harassment when the issue of rape was taboo. I continue to be
deeply shocked and concerned that universities still overlook instances
of sexual harassment and bullying of all sorts with very little systemic
response. How can you be learning when you’re not safe? Lastly, the role
of reframing leadership as really allyship. It is important that older (white)
“experts” step aside and become allies. I know that’s a different way of
looking at leadership, to allow for younger people or for people from the
margins to come in and change the system. That is a constructive other-
wise disruption. Professors should not always be at the front but should
step back to give other people space. That sort of allyship means working
together collectively. Some of it is happening. I was just listening to a law
seminar at the University of Sydney which has changed their curriculum
to bring in Indigenous law systems. I want to keep positive about these
changes; I don’t want to be all gloom. So even if ISS is embedded in the
neoliberal structure, it is still a small place which is trying to do things
differently. I am glad to be part of that collaboration.
Generational Differences
in Spaces for Co-learning
Anna: You both beautifully expressed how you position yourself within
academia and how you see universities as spaces for co-learning. I was
wondering if you feel a generational difference in how your students care
for themselves, with others, with the world, in this context of multiple
crises?
Khaayat: I think that there is a generational difference. The younger
generation is keen on disruptions. We talk about “doom scrolling” for
instance, but among students of a younger generation it is a way of
homing in on issues which are discussed through social media and can
be very progressive. What I especially enjoy about the younger genera-
tion is how they are transforming politics around the body. For example,
the discussion about deciding not to procreate, not to have children;
that is much more open now. The whole notion of body shaming, or
slut shaming, is also recognised. Students and the younger generation in
general are much more eloquent and articulate. I feel that I learn from
them. I agree with Wendy that we need to focus on what we can build. It
is hopeful that younger people are willing to take on boomer-millennial
debates, pushing back on what has come before and disentangling it. Why
is it that people of a certain age, of 25–30 years old, cannot afford homes
in the same way as people could 30 years ago? This issue has implica-
tions for care, since giving quality care is made more difficult without
appropriate shelter and housing.
I want to comment on allyship. I think it’s very important in terms of
our political activism and our political existence. We have people with very
different experiences and whether we’re talking about sexual orientation,
physical and mental abilities, race, class and so on, I think we need to take
seriously what Wendy has said about allyship. Being an ally sometimes
means just listening, and not trying to conceptualise or reframe what the
person is saying and to understand that sometimes we have nothing to
say, we have nothing to contribute, but we can listen.
Wendy: There are generational differences, and I am always learning
from young people. It is not just because you have more years that you
are by default wiser. For example, younger people deal with body politics
and with leadership differently than I did when I was young. I feel that
progressive people in my generation opted out of mainstream politics, and
we left the system to the people that have then made it even more of a
mess. I regret that choice. I realise now we are the system, and we do need
to be part of it and be responsible for it. I am sad personally when students
don’t challenge me when I give lectures, and I hear later that people were
too afraid to ask me because I was the professor. And I always think oh,
but how could someone be scared of me? Then I recognize that it is about
hierarchies- in universities they are difficult to disrupt and I need to be
creative and find other ways to be available.
Returning to the Word “Care”

Anna: Our last question is about the word care itself. Care certainly
has become more and more prominent both in academic discussions
and activist circles, and more recently so in the context of COVID-
19, when people were clapping for caregivers and there was a moment
of hope that maybe the world would give much more value to caring
practices. However, people—and institutions—care in many different and
even conflicting ways. I find the word care quite fascinating because it
embraces so many connotations. And it can even have meanings that
conflict totally with what we would call a feminist ethics of care, if we
consider for example how anti-abortionists care deeply about the foetus
or white supremacists care deeply about the white race. We also had very
interesting discussions within WEGO with some people in our network
feeling much more comfortable with care as a concept than others. Prob-
ably there is no one single definition or set of values attached to care,
and I think it became very clear during this conversation that there are
so many ways to approach it both theoretically and conceptually but also
in daily caring practices. Do you sometimes wonder if ‘care’ is too broad
a word that might hold many contentious meanings and runs the risk of
being mainstreamed and “softwashed” or co-opted by agendas opposed
to what we might consider a feminist ethic and practice of care? Or do
you rather say this is precisely why we take a stance to claim a feminist
understanding of care—holding its inherent contradictions and difficult
questions, such as how our caring might create unequal power relations
and exclusions on its own?
Wendy: We’re susceptible to social media and what the media says is
important to care about, whether it is to consume, or to protest or to
opt out and binge watch (I am thinking here how Netflix became such
a fixture in my friends and family during COVID confinements—it felt
as much a part of self-care as doing indoor exercise). I think there is an
evolving understanding of care by feminists particularly around the ethics

of care which has expanded from counting care work in the economy to
including relations of care with more-than-human others. In her work
Matters of Care (2017), María Puig de la Bellacasa goes deeply into how
care impacts the world on all levels. But there are many and various discus-
sions as we have shown in this conversation. In WEGO, we’ve managed
to collectively consider different meanings of care in a feminist network.
We have had (mostly on-line due to COVID) discussions where people
had different responses. Some felt awkward about the word care, thinking
it is fluffy. But others saw it as a core value to our way of working together
in terms of supporting others and doing ethical research otherwise. So,
I see feminists as exploring the politics of care in diverse and interesting
ways academically and in practice.
Khayaat: There are contradictions in how feminists think about care,
and we work with those contradictions in terms of care exactly so that it
doesn’t get soft-washed just because care is often seen as a very feminised
activity. Care can be seen as demeaning by dominant systems because
it is mostly done by women who are essentialised as having the “nat-
ural” ability to care. It is exciting to work with the contradictions by
putting them on the table, rather than trying to get a unified or unifying
understanding of what care is. And that’s exciting for me, because as we
debate the content of care, we can be more inclusive and push theoretical
boundaries.
Marlene: Talking about contradictions and going back to the question
of age, I agree that care is generational, but it is also intersectional and
relational. Care is fluid, it changes all the time, and it is related to the
porosity of our bodies that are influenced by imaginaries, experiences and
affections we live in our everyday life. Care practices change over time-
we might be careless in one period and careful in another. I have seen it
with my grandfather and my grandmother who have taught me so many
things about caring for the environment, taking care of water, nature and
recycling as much as possible. And then I see my mom caring now for
the environment more rigorously when before she was a bit careless. So,
we care in different ways related to the concerns we live and experience
in our everyday life. Thank you for the discussion, what we have shown
is how care is a very complex activity embedded in contradictions that we
need to continue to question in our research contributions, activism, and
everyday lives.
Conclusion
In our intergenerational conversation we discussed the different ways we
relate to care for humans and more-than-humans by decentring anthro-
pocentric hierarchies and recovering diverse feelings such as grief and
fear from which caring practices emerge. We also highlighted how care
becomes a powerful political practice to transform our realities when we
ask who can care, with whom or what do we care and how do we care.
We explore how the practices of care are intergenerational and polit-
ical, and how valuing care remains an ongoing feminist struggle that
requires continual interventions in public and private institutions. Our
focus was on how care is understood in the academe, in teaching as well
as theory across the generations in order to underline how care is prac-
tised in different ways and at different levels; in ethical and moral systems,
social development strategies and public policies. Within these practices,
we recovered storytelling and doing things otherwise as ways to recognize
the untold histories and colonial legacies embedded in our passions, loves,
and fears that shape our everyday life.
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holder.
CHAPTER 8
Caring Communities for Radical Change:

What Can Feminist Political Ecology Bring
to Degrowth?
Stefania Barca, Giovanna Di Chiro, Wendy Harcourt,

Ilenia Iengo, Panagiota Kotsila, Seema Kulkarni,
Irene Leonardelli, and Chizu Sato
Introduction
In this chapter, we conduct a conversation building from the 8th Inter-
national Degrowth Conference held in The Hague in August 2021 with
S. Barca · I. Iengo · P. Kotsila

University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
G. Di Chiro
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
e-mail: gdichir2@swarthmore.edu
W. Harcourt (B)
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_8
178 S. BARCA ET AL.
the theme of “caring communities for radical change”.1 In this introduc-

tion we start by explaining the synergies between degrowth and FPE.
In Section One “Feminist Political Ecology in Conversation: Caring
Communities for Radical Change” we summarise the three interventions
made by Giovanna Di Chiro, Stefania Barca, and Seema Kulkarni, who
presented their approaches to FPE in one of the conferences’ plenary
sessions. They reflect on their work on environmental and climate justice,
gender, and care in order to suggest different ways that communities of
care can be fundamental components of radical socio-ecological change
towards degrowth. These contributions come from diverse standpoints
of theory and different geographies of work and engagement. All point
to the contradictions between endless economic growth and ecological
balance and social justice. They also emphasise the importance of care
and caring communities in resisting, questioning, and counteracting the
structural racial, gender, and wider social inequalities that uphold and
are perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. In Section Two
1 This chapter is based on a set of conversations around the feminist political ecology
plenary held at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. The plenary
was the culmination of a series of online and in-person conversations between the authors
as we collectively thought about how to bring a feminist political ecology perspective to
the 8th degrowth conference through theme of “caring communities for radical change”.
We were interested in dialoguing with the degrowth community about how feminist theo-
ries and practices of care can contribute to the strengthening, building and imagining of
communities for radical socio-ecological change. The FPE conversation was the WEGO
network’s contribution to the degrowth conference along with other conversations around
decoloniality and arts and culture. The chapter builds on the legacy of earlier Interna-
tional Degrowth Conferences, specifically the 5th and 6th held in Budapest and Malmö,
respectively, when the Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance (FaDA) had its first in-person
meetings, followed by a number of online exchanges and initiatives, including a collective
statement on Covid-19 (FaDA, 2020).
S. Kulkarni
SOPPECOM, Pune, India
I. Leonardelli
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, The Netherlands
e-mail: i.leonardelli@un-ihe.org
C. Sato
Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: chizu.sato@wur.nl
8 CARING COMMUNITIES FOR RADICAL CHANGE … 179
“Towards a Feminist Political Ecology of Degrowth?”, we continue these

reflections with other scholar-activists who also contributed to the FPE
theme at the Conference. The contributions to this section were made
individually, and while the chapter has been reviewed by all the authors,
it should be noted that each author has contributed their own point of
view. Our discussions argue why degrowth needs to take FPE into account
when seeking possibilities for just futures. In Section Three “Conclusion”,
we identify some shared methodological approaches of FPE as we sum
up why care, communities of care, and caring practices for radical change
are key to degrowth. We conclude with some points for the degrowth
movement to take into account from grounded feminist transformative
politics.
Synergies Between Degrowth and FPE

Degrowth is both an academic and activist framework, which seeks alter-
natives to current patterns of economic and socio-ecological destruction
and calls for movement towards a fair and liveable future for all. Degrowth
proposes a scaling down of certain sectors and aspects of the economy
(such as advertising, the military industrial complex, planned obsolescence
of products, and the fossil fuel industry) and supports other kinds of
economies and policies (such as shorter working weeks, a care income,
economies of renewables, and strong public education and healthcare
systems). Degrowth transformations are envisioned as taking place in
equitable and democratic ways by strategically addressing privileges so
as to avoid abrupt changes that will negatively impact the most vulner-
able groups and exacerbate injustice (Chertkovskaya et al., 2019; D’Alisa
et al., 2014; Liegey et al., 2020; Paulson et al., 2020). Through inter-
disciplinary analysis, including with and through social movements and
grassroots initiatives, degrowth aims to debunk the idea that continuous
economic growth is necessary for modern life and civilisation, and that
tweaked versions of “green growth” are capable of addressing the interre-
lated crises of ecological destruction, social injustice, and climate change.
As Schneider and Pope (2020) eloquently summarise “degrowth is not a
passive critique but an active project of hope”.
However, the central issue of unequal power and privilege is often left
unquestioned in degrowth propositions, especially in terms of who needs
to or can afford to “degrow”, whose claims and demands are repre-
sented in the degrowth movement, and how subaltern, racialised, and
180 S. BARCA ET AL.
gendered communities at the global and local levels would be impacted by

degrowth initiatives, policies, and approaches (Smith et al., 2021). While
these tensions and questions are common in many articulations of alterna-
tives (Argüelles et al., 2017), we feel it is important to interrogate power
relationships in emerging imaginaries of radical socio-ecological change
like degrowth. In this chapter, we outline ways in which feminist political
ecology (FPE) perspectives can contribute to degrowth analysis and polit-
ical strategy. We aim to strengthen the radical potential of degrowth by
problematising and pushing forward the questions of who is recognised
in, or can be part of, degrowth communities of practice and thought.
An emerging realm of FPE scholarship focuses on power analyses
in degrowth (Paulson, 2017), with particular attention to coloniality
(Dengler & Seebacher, 2019), race (Abazeri, 2022; Gilmore, 2013),
class and labour (Barca, 2019), and gender (FaDA, 2020; Saave-Harnack
et al., 2019). Neera Singh (2019), for example, stresses the need for
deeper mutual learning between environmental justice movements of the
global South and degrowth, in order to discover common ontological
grounds for “other ways of being”. She argues that an examination of
on-the-ground practices and epistemologies of local communities can
help “reconceptualize work and care in a post-production, post-growth
world” (Singh, 2019, p. 139). In a similar vein, Padini Nirmal and
Dianne Rocheleau (2019) propose a feminist and decolonial perspective
on degrowth that is “materially and ecologically rooted and cultur-
ally expanded” through practices of “re-rooting and re-commoning”
(Nirmal & Rocheleau, 2019, p. 470), what they refer to as “regrowth”—
practices of regeneration and collective flourishing that counter the
destructive legacies and paradigms of colonialist expansion and capitalist
forms of growth.
Feminist economists have been among the first to criticise GDP growth
from the point of view of class, gender, and colonial inequalities (Grego-
ratti & Raphael, 2019; Wichterich, 2014). As scholars and activists
from the “Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance” (FaDA) have highlighted,
rather than understanding degrowth as just about shrinking the economy,
degrowth should be focused on transforming core institutions that govern
production and reproduction, inspired by and grounded in feminist tradi-
tions (Saave-Harnack et al., 2019). Part of this vision and challenge is to
re-situate and re-value care at the centre of socio-ecological processes and
systems: to treat care as a core common for a liveable future. But what is
meant by the term and concept of care? And what kind of caring practices
and communities can support a radical social transformation?
FPE seeks to answer these questions in diverse ways. FPE is a
convening space of research and ideas where scholars theorise different
forms of power and access to resources. FPE understands people as
embodied and emotional beings with “complex and shifting relationships
to the natural world, embedded in place and shaped by interactions of
gender, race, class, caste, culture, age (and so on)”, moving towards envi-
ronmental and social justice (Resurrección, 2017, p. 74). In FPE, the
concept of care is theorised in various ways. In their edited volume, for
example, Wendy Harcourt and Christine Bauhardt (2018), delineate some
main threads of thought around care as the gendered work of social repro-
duction: care as a form of commoning; care as looking after and providing
for human and nonhuman others; and care as interspecies reciprocity and
more-than-human relations.
FPE thus highlights the central role of socio-ecological production
and reproduction and the labour of care as the foundation of plane-
tary well-being by asking more specifically: in what ways can economies
be transformed in terms of provisioning and care while degrowing in a
socially just manner? What can we learn, in this regard, from commu-
nities who are fighting every day for environmental and social justice, or
simply for their own well-being and survival on earth? This learning might
well go beyond social reproduction and the care of human families and
communities to include the work of “earthcare” (Merchant, 1989) and
environmental struggles in the defence of and care for more-than-human
others (Barca, 2020b; Fragnito & Tola, 2021). What would this expanded
understanding of care, beyond but including social reproduction, mean
for a new politics of care commoning? As Chizu Sato and Jozelin Soto
Alarcón point out, “community is, by definition, constituted through
commoning. It is the process and site of being produced through sharing
a property, a practice, or a knowledge” (2019, p. 38). Building on these
different understandings of care, we ask: what are caring communities
in a post-capitalist, post-growth future and what are the main challenges
ahead?
In this chapter we contribute to ongoing discussions on care and
communities in degrowth by looking at how societies can be reorgan-
ised in ways that promote intersectional justice and the sustainability of
life. We argue that care is crucial to social and ecological reproduction
as we critically reflect on the experiences of paid versus unpaid, collec-
tivised versus feminised care work in order to build just, sustainable, and
182 S. BARCA ET AL.
convivial societies. We propose these ideas as essential contributions to

degrowth debates.
Feminist Political Ecology in Conversation:

Caring Communities for Radical Change
One of the starting points of the 8th International Degrowth Confer-
ence in August 2021 was that “it is not enough to build a movement;
we need to build community”. In what follows, Giovanna, Stefania and
Seema reflect on how this entry point resonates with their work on envi-
ronmental and climate justice, gender, and care and in what way this
contributes to degrowth debates.
Giovanna Di Chiro: Practising Collective Care—Environmental

Justice, Kinship, and Interdependence
Many of the panels and workshops at the Degrowth conference were
exploring the core question: what does a caring, strong, and resilient
“community” look like? I’m interested in the questions of who we imagine
as members of our community and who we see as partners in co-creating
a more caring world. I have learned a lot from the members of environ-
mental justice and Indigenous communities with whom I have studied
and collaborated over the past four decades.
One of these important mentors for me is the late Grace Lee Boggs,
the Detroit-based revolutionary who, in her 100-year life, after having
participated in virtually every major social and environmental justice
movement of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, concluded
that “social movements are born of critical connections rather than crit-
ical mass” (2012, p. 35). I think that building critical connections and
dependable relationships across differences of all kinds is what fuels strong
communities and robust socio-ecological movements, especially in times
of escalating uncertainty and danger. But, as Potawatomi scholar Kyle
Powys Whyte (2020) has argued, trustworthy and durable relationships
have been undermined or destroyed by historical and ongoing colonial
and capitalist systems. He writes:
As kinship-based interdependency declines, climatic disruptions can be

experienced as abrupt and escalating because responsiveness becomes hard
to achieve. For whom do we reach out to as trusted partners for coordi-

nated action?…We must take urgent action to establish or repair kinship
relationships. Or else we will not have the interdependence required for
responsiveness that prevents harm and violence. (pp. 40–42)
For Whyte, and many others, kinship relationships are the foundation
of social and ecological interdependence, and when these relationships
of interdependence are disrupted, then social, ecological, and climate
systems are also disrupted. Caring communities are rooted in the recogni-
tion of interdependence and being in “right relationship” with all our kin,
with all of our human and other-than-human relatives (Tallbear, 2019,
p. 31).
The critical scholarship of activists like Whyte, Tallbear, and many
others has taught me that, as we strive to build diverse communities
working towards a just transition to more equitable and liveable futures,
we need to ensure that our calls for degrowth, decolonisation, environ-
mental justice, and caring communities are not just metaphors (Tuck &
Yang, 2012). Part of seeing decolonisation (or degrowth) as not just a
metaphor, and striving to build diverse communities of care, is about
taking seriously the histories of the land that we are living on and
learning about the long-standing connections to land and place and the
sustainable lifeways practised by the people who have lived there for
generations. Many Indigenous feminist scholars have argued that “pro-
gressive” green movements such as environmentalism, sustainability, and
degrowth rely on colonial abstractions/metaphors of “the commons”
as the green spaces, land bases, and natural resources that must be
protected and preserved for the “common good” (Arvin et al., 2013;
Liboiron, 2021; Whyte, 2020). Embracing the idea of “the commons”
(including, for example, the common land bases that are needed to
build and operate solar and wind farms, ecological agriculture opera-
tions, community land trusts, conservation areas, or recycling centres)
without an anti/decolonial lens, sustains colonial land relations and “set-
tler futures” since much of what is considered the commons consists of
unceded Indigenous lands and unacknowledged historical and ongoing
dispossession and devastation of Indigenous lives (Liboiron, 2021, p. 36).
For many Indigenous environmental justice scholars, therefore, practising
“good land relations” is an essential component for creating truly just and
caring communities.
184 S. BARCA ET AL.
An important piece of my own critical practice has been to engage

what Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) calls
“land as pedagogy” by situating my research and teaching in the places,
geographies, and community ecologies in which I live. Potawatomi envi-
ronmental scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer has argued that part of this
practice involves “indigenizing” our relationships with our places. She
explains that it is “…not to appropriate the culture of indigenous people”,
but rather one must “live as if we’ll be here for the long haul, to take care
of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, depended on it”
(2013). One example of how I strive to build kin-centric relationships
living and working in the Philadelphia metropolitan region is partici-
pating in a campus-community collaborative I co-founded in 2012 called
Serenity Soular. Serenity Soular’s mission is to bring solar technology,
sustainable community development, and solar jobs training opportuni-
ties to residents in North Philadelphia, a majority-Black section of the
city suffering from the harms of environmental racism and long-standing
economic and social disinvestment. We spell solar s-o-u-l-ar to empha-
sise our intention to keeping the soul—or our connection to the people
and the commitment to environmental justice—at the forefront of our
strategies to build a movement towards a “just transition” for the city
and beyond (Di Chiro & Rigell, 2018).
Another example of how I imagine “otherwise worlds” grounded in
care comes out of my and my students’ collaboration with local activist
Zulene Mayfield, long-time leader of Chester Residents Concerned for
Quality of Life (CRCQL), a 30-year-old grassroots environmental justice
organisation located in nearby Chester, Pennsylvania, an impoverished city
whose population is 70% African American and that houses the United
States’ largest waste incinerator. My students and I have been working
with Zulene and CRCQL for several years assisting with campaigns to
shut down the incinerator and transition towards a more just, cleaner,
zero waste economy in the region. Zulene has always expressed the
sentiment that it’s important for us to see ourselves as living in kinship
relations with residents of nearby Chester, despite the fact that our life
conditions may be worlds apart. She has told my students: “Chester
does not have a Wakanda Shield over the city keeping the pollutants
from travelling all over the region. The pollution doesn’t just hover
over Chester. The rest of our county is also harmed by the incinera-
tor”. This kind of kin-centric environmental justice organising is an active,
embodied approach for building critical connections; to use Grace Lee
Boggs’ words, it means seeing your own body, your own lifeworlds in
the action. Such collaborations challenge the culture of individualism so
ingrained in Western thinking. I think these critical connections make
tangible what is really meant by interdependence and collective care.
Stefania Barca: Communities of Earthcare

The first story that comes to mind when speaking of “communities of
care” is that of Praialta Piranheira, the agroforestry settlement in the
Brazilian Amazon which inspired my latest book entitled Forces of Repro-
duction (2020a). Praialta is a particular type of protected area—what the
Brazilian law calls “extractive reserve”, i.e., public land which is set aside
from capitalist exploitation and the GDP growth imperative and managed
by communities who provision themselves via sustainable extraction of
wild fruits, nuts, seafood, and other non-timber-forest-products. Brazil’s
extractive reserves originated from grassroots struggles for social justice
dating back to the 1980s and to the Alliance of Forest Peoples (Barca &
Milanez, 2021). I see these as struggles for the interspecies commons,
intended here as a political community made up of forest and people that
do not see their humanity as separate from the nonhuman, but rather as
co-existence and re-existence with it.
This interspecies community includes Indigenous populations, but also
the rubber tappers and other racialised people who call themselves “tradi-
tional”, and that reproduce themselves with a variety of biomes—not only
forest but also riverine ecosystems and mangroves. Their livelihood, food
sovereignty, and well-being depend on the wealth of their territories, so
they take care of these territories with a spirit of both earth and self-care.
Zé Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria Do Espírito Santo, for example,
the extractivistas whose story inspired my book, made a living via the
extraction of the castanha do Pará (Brazil-nut), which they collected from
the plot assigned to them within the Praialta settlement. Keeping the
Castanheira alive and healthy, by defending it from illegal cutting and
timber trafficking, was their primary preoccupation—their life project.
Their idea of interspecies commoning can be heard from their own voices
through the beautiful documentary film Toxic: Amazonia (Milanez &
Loyola 2011; see also Milanez, 2015).
The communities of earthcare that Brazilians call “extractive reserves”
are the product of historical agency, of social conflict and struggle, of
resistance to capitalist patriarchy and white supremacy, to GDP growth,
186 S. BARCA ET AL.
and to the financialisation of nature over the past few decades. As the
caring logic stands opposite to the logic of extraction (in the capitalist
and productivist sense of the term), earthcare communities are constantly
threatened and targeted with structural violence—both physical and
symbolic. Today, many extractivistas are forced to leave the reserve and
move to urban areas or to plantations to become proletarians—part of the
labour force for capitalist growth. The rationale behind this is to break
people’s caring relationship with each other and with the land—to turn
more-than-human communities into individual proletarians and resources
awaiting exploitation. These pressures have been constant throughout the
entire history of Brazil, and have escalated during Bolsonaro’s govern-
ment, a fascist mix of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and climate
denialism (Iamamoto et al., 2021). At the time of writing, the Supreme
Federal Court of Brazil is deciding over the government’s proposal to
drastically reduce the recognition of indigenous territories—a move that
spurred the largest Indigenous mobilisation in more than 30 years, with
6000 people camping in the capital Brasilia in the summer of 2021.
Feminist political ecology helps us to make sense of the story of
Brazil’s earthcare communities by highlighting one key component of
their struggle: the relevance and value of care work, extending the
focus from the domestic realm to that of the land and nonhuman envi-
ronment. I borrow the term earthcare from white ecofeminist scholar
Carolyn Merchant (1980), who wrote about the historically constructed
nexus between women and care in Western culture, to make critical
sense of women’s agency in a number of environmental mobilisations.
However, my understanding of earthcare goes beyond the focus on
women, and also beyond environmental mobilisation itself. Inspired by
Ariel Salleh’s concept of meta-industrial labour (2010), and based on
the story of Prailata Piracheira, I see earthcare as the labour of envi-
ronmental reproduction, i.e., “the work of making nonhuman nature fit
for human reproduction while also protecting it from exploitation, and
securing the conditions for nature’s own regeneration, for the needs of
present and future generations” (Barca, 2020a, p. 32). Earth-carers keep
the world alive, yet their environmental agency goes largely unrecog-
nised in mainstream narratives of the catastrophic earth-system change
epoch that scientists have called the Anthropocene. This invisibilisa-
tion of earthcare labour, I argue, has to do with the dominant cultural
paradigms of capitalist, industrial modernity, a historical formation which
identifies modernity with the “forces of production” and with human
geo-supremacy. Undoing the geo-supremacy perspective is thus necessary

to see communities of earth-carers as part of a larger historical agency that
has been of fundamental relevance to the reproduction of earth systems
throughout human history.
Environmental reproduction is a feminist concept, insofar as it is
based on a de-naturalisation of reproductive work, as well as making
visible its social and ecological relevance beyond the domestic/subsistence
sphere. It also aims to call attention to the social processes which
tend to appropriate this work and subsume it within capitalist or state-
productivist political economy, which prioritise GDP growth over both
human and nonhuman life. Like women in social reproduction, so
racialised, colonised, and/or low-income people, peasant, Indigenous,
and Afrodescendant communities, have historically been assigned the role
of reproducers of nonhuman nature—what economists and technocrats
now call ecosystem services. Interesting contradictions can be observed in
this “hidden abode”—borrowing the term from Nancy Fraser (2014)—of
nature conservation. Taking mostly place outside of capitalist wage rela-
tions, this work is also non-alienated—i.e., it allows people to engage in
a direct relationship with nonhuman nature and to reconnect with their
species-being. At the same time, the logic of endless capitalist accumula-
tion pushes towards the disappearance of autonomous and subsistence
work by all means, including both symbolic and material violence, by
financialising and subsuming all forms of care within capitalist relations.
Learning from Maria do Espírito Santo, as she described her involvement
in the Praialta project (Milanez, 2015), I see this fundamental contradic-
tion of environmental reproduction as the context from which earthcare
struggles emerge, as both organised resistance to value extraction and
as the daily micropolitics of re-existing with nonhuman nature in rela-
tions of care. This is why I have proposed to understand earth-carers as
“forces of reproduction” (Barca, 2020a), i.e., historical subjects with a
counter-hegemonic potential, which finds expression in organised polit-
ical struggle, locally, nationally, as well as globally (Goodman & Salleh,
2013).
As the 2021 degrowth conference in The Hague demonstrated, the
degrowth movement, which emerged from Western critical consciousness
of both planetary and social limits to GDP growth, is evolving towards a
fuller realisation of the patriarchal and racial/colonial roots of the growth
imperative. Together with decolonial scholarship and activism, FPE makes
188 S. BARCA ET AL.
a fundamental contribution to this effort, pushing a re-definition of

degrowth politics based on the assumption that “the foundations of
the wealth and well-being of the world rest upon the sphere of social
reproduction and the labour of care” (FaDA, 2020). If degrowth poli-
tics consists in the search for a radical alternative to the hegemonic
paradigm of GDP growth as the foundation of wealth and well-being,
then earthcare communities must take central place in it.
Seema Kulkarni: Communities of Care as Gendered Struggles

for Agency and Survival
As part of the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM, the Forum for
Women Farmers Rights) we engage on various issues faced by disenfran-
chised and exploited women from diverse socio-economic groups working
as agricultural, forest, and livestock (migrant) workers and cultivators
across 22 states of India. They face the triple burden of exploitation due to
caste, gender, and class, yet they exhibit agency in multiple ways—much
of it being necessary for survival. MAKAAM voices the concerns raised
by its diverse members among whom are various grassroots organisations,
women farmers, and labourers.
Lata is a migrant sugarcane worker, who belongs to a disadvantaged
caste and class, working in the western Indian State of Maharashtra.
Today, sugarcane is used not only for producing sugar. The sugar lobby
is increasingly diversifying into multiple trades like ethanol and alcohol
production. The sugar factory extracts more and more profit from the
cheap labour of the migrant workers, especially women like Lata. Typi-
cally, contracts are made with the man of the household, leaving Lata
without direct access to her wage. She and her husband work as a
unit, referred to as Koyta (sickle), and perform arduous tasks, such as
harvesting cane, tying cane bundles, and loading, unloading, and trans-
porting them to the factory. The working day is usually 12–13 hours long
as the contractor and middleman insist each Koyta to meet the daily target
of harvesting two tonnes of cane for the factory owner, who aims to crush
the cane to the maximum capacity of the factory to maximise profits. Lata
and other women workers wake up at 3 am to load the trucks, often at
the cost of their health. None can afford illness since missing work incurs
a huge fine which is usually twice that of the wages earned. Menstru-
ating and pregnant women thus continue to work despite the discomfort.
Some women work till the last hour of their pregnancy and deliver at
the worksite itself. Single women workers often suffer sexual harassment
at the workplace and have to carry their young children around during
work (Shukla & Kulkarni, 2019).
When Lata is not migrating for her survival, she leases land from
an upper caste landlord and engages in subsistence farming to support
herself and her family. Being a poor woman from a “lower” caste has
meant that she rarely receives timely support to carry out her agricultural
work, and even the delayed support from the upper caste communities
comes only if she can return the favours, for example, sexual favours or
exchange of free labour. As a result, Lata not only loses out on getting
good yields, but her mental peace is also compromised. Lata loses out
because of her caste, class, and gender disadvantage. In addition to the
long working day as both a sugarcane migrant worker and a subsis-
tence farmer at home, Lata devotes additional four to five hours for
unpaid household work: childcare, cooking, cleaning, and fetching fuel
and water. MAKAAM supported individual women sugarcane workers to
form the Women Sugarcane Harvesters Organisation, so that Lata and
women farmers like her became associated with MAKAAM through their
grassroots organisation.
There are many contradictions when it comes to conceptualising or
reflecting on notions of care without paying attention to the gendered
division of labour. The notion of care depoliticises the question of unpaid
work done by women, if it is not grounded in a Marxist feminist under-
standing that questions capitalist accumulation based on the free labour
of women, like Lata, who belong to the disadvantaged sections of society.
Women’s non-wage work, variously called care work or reproductive,
emotional, or affective labour, is necessary for the existence of wage
work and for the accumulation of capital. Broadly speaking, mainstream
thinking and that from some quarters of environmental groups focus
on the economic and ecological crisis, and the solutions (e.g., ecolog-
ical farming and climate smart agriculture), often gloss over the unpaid
or non-wage care work of women. Ecological health and the contribu-
tions of women’s unpaid care work towards it will thus have to be framed
in a manner that addresses upfront the question of women’s ownership
and control over resources. For example, ecological agriculture calls for
caring for soils, selecting and conserving local varieties of seed, bringing
a diversity of crops to the farm, or managing an integrated farm with
backyard poultry and other animals. It is assumed that this work would
be done by the women of the household, while men continue with the
190 S. BARCA ET AL.
business-as-usual commercialised farming that includes the cultivation of

sugarcane, cotton, etc. Such harm will have to be addressed by centring
the issue of care in development thinking. When considering social and
political organising, we need to consider the struggle for entitlements,
rights over resources, and women’s unpaid work alongside the call for
ecological health. By working with MAKAAM I have learned that both
are needed and must go hand in hand. Ecological health cannot be framed
within an extractive capitalist paradigm which free rides on the non-wage
work of women and the poor and the environment.
We demand the state give us as a matter of right not only land and
welfare, but also support to rebuild our soils and our lives through
agroecological farming. Our two-fold strategy is thus one of reimagining
our world that was in harmony with nature while addressing discrimina-
tion based on class, caste, and gender. Our struggles, mobilisation, and
demands articulate both of these positions. These combined demands call
for a just society that cares and values the knowledge and work of the
women and men of disadvantaged communities. It values and cares for
nature—land, water, and forests.
Drawing on the work of Maria Mies (1998) and others we believe that
the solutions lie in reconceptualising the concepts of economy and labour.
The question of women’s work and rights, and the question of ecological,
social, and economic sustainability have to be placed at the centre of our
analysis and politics. But this requires a different view of the economy
and of society, which requires that we start paying attention to the work
of nature and her regenerative cycles, and valuing women’s unpaid care
work in the household as well as all other non-wage work for subsistence.
We also have to keep in mind that communities are not homogenous and
cohesive but have diverse groups, often in conflict with each other. The
women we are working with have long been exploited due to their class
and caste positions in this capitalist world. Their struggles have thus been
to fight the caste-based capitalist patriarchy. In this new framing we have
to be conscious that the burden of care does not rest with women and
the disadvantaged social groups who have thus far carried this burden on
their shoulders. Care and social justice will have to go hand in hand if
“otherwise desirable worlds” have to become a reality.
Towards a Feminist Political

Ecology of Degrowth?
Following these insights on environmental and climate justice, gender,
care, and degrowth by Giovanna, Stefania and Seema, we now discuss
two challenges for a FPE degrowth, one concerning how to create
communities of care as we reckon with our troubling past, and the other
problematising normative assumptions about health and well-being from
an embodied socio-environmental justice perspective.
Linking Communities of Care and Reckoning with the Past

Panagiota: Stefania spoke of environmental defenders, and of the
violence suffered as part of a struggle to care with nature—which she
expressed through this concept of florestania—a violence brought about
by political forces who want to break these relationships of care devel-
oped between people and more-than-human, these kinships formed in the
forests in Brazil. At the same time, most recent work and activism around
the commoning of social reproduction (Federici, 2019) and introducing
a care income—the idea of recognising and remunerating care work—
highlights perhaps more gendered aspects of care as socio-ecological
reproduction and brings forward the demand of reclaiming care as
commons, in a way of taking common responsibility for it in society
(Barca, 2020a, p. 7). What can be potential common points between
environmental defenders as caring communities, and the communities and
economies that could be formed around this idea of care as commons?
Care can be understood as a “glue” concept that links demands on
visibilising and valuing socio-ecological reproductive labour (the work of
care and earthcare) and aligns with ecofeminist thought on how the domi-
nation and subordination of female—and other racialised, LGBTQI+,
Indigenous, lower-caste and ethnic minority or otherwise marginalised—
people, parallels the abusive extractivist activities that change environ-
ments and threaten life itself. Thus, care can signal the need to put life
and the everyday activities that ensure the physical and emotional well-
being of people along with ecological well-being, at the centre of politics
and the economy (Pérez Orozco, 2014, p. 93).
In this sense, there are communities who engage with different facets
of caring interdependencies: those who organise to protect forests, those
who struggle for creating agricultural or solar commons, and others who
192 S. BARCA ET AL.
embody and fight against climate and environmental injustice in risky

landscapes. A key question which we need to continue to ask is, then, how
these different communities and struggles can come together, inform and
complement each other.
How can we bring into conversation the everyday realities of care work
and the work of doing environmental justice, in a translocal manner, hori-
zontally, and with a common goal to change the paradigm, the narrative,
and eventually, the system, towards a more complete horizon of degrowth
attuned to socio-environmental justice? How important is it especially
now, to speak about histories of violence and oppression as well as of
stories and events that are able to inspire hope—at a time when calls for
urgent action (e.g., related to climate change and often directed to those
in power) in some ways risk obscuring the voices of activists and affected
groups that have been already acting, struggling, dealing with climate
change impacts and devising alternatives?
Seema: Engagement with the past is critical for reimagining the future.
Social discrimination and exploitation as a result of caste, class, and
capitalist patriarchy all need to be understood in a historical context.
Challenging structural inequalities and unequal power relations becomes
possible only in the full awareness of the histories of this exploitation. The
agenda of justice-focused movements must be to move away from this
past and into reimagining a future which is based on equality and equal
opportunities. Can degrowth include these unsettling historical dynamics
when it engages with and mobilises elements of the past that cared for
nature and lived in harmony with it for a mutual co-existence, in its ques-
tioning of the growth trajectory and its limits in relation to planetary
ecological balance and social justice?
FPE does not lend itself to easy generalisations. It carries within it
some of the contradictions produced by patriarchal societies by identifying
women with nature, as highlighted by early ecofeminist scholars, such as
Mary Mellor (1994) or Carolyn Merchant (1989). Feminists working in
the South were concerned with the material survival of women in poor
communities who depended on natural resources (Agarwal, 1992; Mies &
Shiva, 1993; Shiva, 1989). Diverse positions articulated by feminists in
conversation with the degrowth movements need to be acknowledged
and contextualised as we reimagine our futures. Women, especially from
disadvantaged communities, are likely to be excluded if present mate-
rial inequalities go unchallenged. In the Indian context for example, the
continuation of the caste system is beneficial for the powerful upper caste
communities as they can retain control over means of production, division

of labour, and knowledge.
Irene: Building on from what Seema states, patriarchal social norms
keep marginalising women across caste and class. This is evident in rural
India, where the conceptualisation of “farmers” most often reproduces
the imaginary of farmers as male landowners (Agarwal, 2003; Padhi,
2012), although women perform most of the everyday work in the farm.
For instance, in rural Maharashtra, where I conducted fieldwork in collab-
oration with Seema and other colleagues working at Soppecom, it is most
often women farmers who take care of sowing, weeding, harvesting, and
milking cows. Increasingly, they also engage in irrigation, a task tradi-
tionally seen as part of the male domain. From morning to evening they
have their hands in the soil: their lives, and their bodies are profoundly
woven together, or co-become, with the soil and the water that allow
them to farm. Despite being marginalised institutionally and socially, I
have often appreciated how women farmers have their ways to influ-
ence decision-making processes within the household. They play a role
in deciding what to cultivate and how to organise the space of the
farm; they often organise work in collective ways and collaborate, increas-
ingly across caste lines. Counteracting patriarchal and casteist dynamics
is often a subtle process. Yet simultaneously, water is increasingly scarce
and of poor quality; climate change makes weather conditions increasingly
unpredictable; agricultural costs keep increasing and, with it, indebted-
ness; the market is very volatile. There is pride and joy, and hope for the
future, as well as pain and fear in women farmers’ narratives.
Building caring communities, as building kin-centric communities, is
a process that must go hand in hand with caring for forests, waters, and
farms. It entails thinking about more-than-human ethics as a process of
co-becoming across scales as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) has suggested.
To engage in such a process, it is important to learn from communi-
ties and organised movements that are already striving for radical change,
refusing to align themselves to the violent heteropatriarchal-productivist
logics of capitalism. Yet along with organised movements and strug-
gles, a way to create transnational feminist caring communities is also
that of learning from, giving space, and creating alliances with those
who are fighting for more equitable and ethical presents and futures in
their everyday life, often in subtle, yet transformative ways. Moving from
my position of privilege and recognising the uneven and non-innocent
threads through which more-than-humans co-become on earth, I orient
194 S. BARCA ET AL.
my engagement with women farmers in Maharashtra in this direction—

inspired by the work of Seema and other members of the MAKAAM
network.
Chizu: In this regard, lessons can be learned from FPE, in particular
the combination of anti-essentialist Marxism and community economies,
which makes it possible to see beyond the capitalist economy in ways
that strengthen the project of degrowth. In Marxist thought, exploita-
tion occurs when surplus—labour above what is necessary to reproduce
the labourer—is appropriated by non-direct labourers (Gibson-Graham
et al., 2000). Exploitation thus occurs not only in capitalist but also in
feudal, and slave class processes, when non-direct labourers appropriate
direct labourers’ surplus. While the existence of capitalist class processes
in the forms of capitalist extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon and capital
accumulation by sugarcane factories in India is hard to miss in the reflec-
tions, there is at least one non-capitalist exploitative class in the reflections:
a feudal class process within a household where a husband appropriates
surplus from his wife’s non-waged care work.
When building communities of care using an anti-essentialist Marxian
ethic, it is crucial to recognise that exploitation deprives labourers
of opportunities to invest the surplus they produced in building a
community in which members take care to meet each other’s needs
(Community Economies Collective, 2001). Furthermore, more-than-
human community economies scholars (e.g., Gibson-Graham & Miller,
2015; Roelvink & Gibson-Graham, 2009; Sato & Soto Alarcón, 2019),
illuminate diverse economies performed not only by humans but also
by earthothers. These writers point to the interdependence of different
species economies. In neoliberal capitalist relations, labour that is produc-
tive is the labour that produces more surplus, and more-than-human
earthothers are objects to be consumed in production. These three reflec-
tions make visible how these relations and practices disrupt kin-centric
relationships between humans and earthothers. The combination of anti-
essentialist Marxism, community economies, and FPE perspectives offered
by Giovanna, Stefania, Seema, and others, enable us to see often unpaid
and invisible care work performed by people from marginalised commu-
nities and more-than-human earthothers. Once seen, this care work can
now be recognised as productive, not because it produces more surplus
but because surplus is used to build more convivial communities for all its
members of the community, while discouraging socio-ecological relations
recognised as exploitative and unjust through a decolonial, intersectional

lens.
Looking at degrowth (and degrowing economies) from this perspec-
tive forces us to recognise that there is no single economy. Any economy
is constituted by a constellation of multiple economies and human
economies are nested in human and more-than-human economies. This
perspective, articulated in the reflections, redefines exploitation based
on an FPE ethic of care, insofar as exploitation deprives both people
and earthothers of opportunities to build a more convivial, socially, and
environmentally just, kin-centric multispecies community. This under-
standing offers a framework that is useful for discovering how to work
towards degrowth together, while remaining sensitive to historically
developed, hierarchical, or unequal socio-ecological relationships that
obstruct building a community of degrowth.
Embodied Social and Ecological Health

Ilenia: As Giovanna, Seema and Stefania urge us to reckon with oppres-
sions which have been historically and materially determined by focusing
on movements and experiences who strive to dismantle institutionalised
violence, our conversation brings into question the issue of futurity.
Degrowth at its core engages with desirable notions of the future.
FPE can amplify the standpoint, experiences, and propositions of those
who have been absent or even excluded from radical political imaginaries.
In the brilliant book entitled Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) reflects on Qwo-Li Driskill’s
words when they say, “one way ableism works is that disabled people are
not even present within the imaginations of a supposedly radical future”
(p. 215). It is time we take up their invitation to look at the absences
that exist within degrowth imaginaries of the future. For a very long
time, we have missed feminist interventions on the embodied and multi-
faceted understandings of social and ecological health that complicate the
binary thinking which posits and understands human and more-than-
human health as the opposite of sickness, disability, unproductiveness,
and disposability; in other words, what Giovanna has called in some of
her previous work, “ecoheteronormativity” (2010). It is important to
produce anti-ableist understandings of socio-ecological health, reflecting
on how it changes over time and place, how it is politicised from different
positionalities and contexts and put at the centre of multiple tactics of
196 S. BARCA ET AL.
anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-heteropatriarchal, and decolonial coalition-

building work. By way of shaking up some of the underlying assumptions
about ability in degrowth, we bring ageing and disabled bodies and
communities into current imaginaries of degrowth futures and provide
room for representation of crip and subaltern kinship without exploiting
or instrumentalising them as a resource or inspiration. Building on our
previous interventions, I would like to bring in Crip theory and disability
justice (Clare, 2017; Kafer, 2013; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018, see also
Chapter 4 in this volume) in order to point out how it is important to see
disability through an intersectional lens. Listening to those who have been
excluded or oppressed due to disability can help to open the conversa-
tion about the assumptions concerning the natural bodies. Unquestioned
assumptions around bodies and sexualities need to be questioned in
degrowth discourses and practice to give space to dissident/othered
embodiments and trouble and transform the futures we envision towards
wider and more inclusive justice. We bring to degrowth the insights of
feminist science and technology studies in order to challenge normative
values that exclude and create barriers around disability.
Given Giovanna, Seema, and Stefania’s experience and knowledge
in social and environmental justice organising, we move to focus on
who is included or excluded in our radical political imaginaries, such as
degrowth. What kinds of knowledge, bodies, and territories, are at the
margins of inclusion/exclusion not only of our current unjust societies
but also of our political/radical organisations and communities?
Stefania: One example of such inclusion/exclusion dynamics relates
to occupational health struggles in working-class communities. Occupa-
tional health has been long associated with public and with environmental
health, but both scientific practices and management and regulation
have tended to hide or underplay those connections to separate the
three spheres of health (public, occupational, environmental). Moreover,
“jobs blackmail” and other ideological constructs have divided commu-
nities and obstructed their search for justice and economic alternatives.
Here is where the inclusion/exclusion dialectic becomes essential. Taking
the male industrial worker as a reference point for healthiness has long
misguided the understanding of the effects of industrial hazards on larger
communities—including people with different bodies.
The male breadwinner’s sacrifice for family, community, and the
nation’s GDP implies the silent and misrecognised sacrifice of others
around them whose bodies were left out of the account. There is a
whole history to be written about the sacrificing of women’s health to

industrial development and their agency in reshaping dominant concep-
tions of health by enlarging the boundaries of whose health is accounted
for, and what health means in the first place. Children’s health, or that
of nonhuman animals and life-support systems to which working-class
communities are linked through relations of care and interdependency,
are similarly excluded.
In some cases, however, the affected people themselves, and the social
movements they have built, have struggled for recognition of the non-
separation between different kinds of bodies and their environment.
Mobilisations against the Ilva steel plant in Taranto, Italy (Barca &
Leonardi, 2018) testify to a specific kind of environmental justice, what
I have called working-class environmentalism: struggles for reproduction
led by working-class communities in recognition of the fact that industrial
growth was built upon the sacrifice—the supposed disposability—of their
bodies and of nonhuman life in their territories.
Giovanna: A core body of critical ecofeminist literature and activism
joins together disability theory, queer theory, and environmental justice
praxis articulating the values of collective care and kinship relations. The
work of scholar-activists such as Patty Berne and Vanessa Raditz (2019),
Eli Clare (2009), Shayda Kafai (2021), Alison Kafer (2013), Mia Mingus
(2022), and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2021) highlights how
people living with disabilities and queer people know how to build caring
communities for mutual thriving in the face of multiple crises because
they have always had to “crip the apocalypse” in order to survive in a
world that wants them disappeared or dead. Creativity and collective care
are the cornerstones for “dreaming wild disability justice futures”, argues
Piepzna-Samarasinha (2021, p. 250). Such futures are made possible
through the creation of “vibrant, innovative, crip-made forms of organ-
ising” such as new collectivities, alternative care-based institutions, and
accessibility hubs and “homespaces” that are “continuing to save every-
one’s asses” providing sustenance, shelter, personal protective equipment
(masks), legal assistance, and mutual aid in response to the violence of
escalating climate change, global pandemics, and social precarity (ibid.,
p. 254).
Refusing pain—or “damage-centered” theorising and organising
(Tuck, 2009), these scholar-activists are foregrounding how marginalised
communities are challenging capitalism’s fantasy of the “self-made man”,
198 S. BARCA ET AL.
a fantasy based on the cultural illusions of individualism and self-

sufficiency that can only be sustained by devaluing and making invisible
the essential social reproductive labour performed by women, working-
class people, and racialised communities (see Barca, 2020b; Sato &
Soto Alarcón, 2019). Instead, these writers document how queer, crip,
BIPOC, and low-income communities are reimagining and prefiguring
climate resilience and flourishing lifeworlds by building anti-colonial,
post-capitalist economies of repair and care grounded in the principles
of “interdependence and collectivity” (Clare, 2009, p. 106). Echoing this
point, long-time feminist, disability, and queer activists Patty Berne and
Vanessa Raditz (2019) write that we must “see parallels in the havoc that
capitalism and the drive to hoard wealth has wreaked on our bodies as
queer people, gender nonconforming folks, and people from colonized
lands, and how capitalism has abused and exploits the land”. Arguing
that our collective futures depend on our recognition of the importance
of caring for and sustaining both human diversity and biodiversity, they
continue:
The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia

may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented
moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the
way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos. The history
of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative
problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs. If we
can build an intersectional climate justice movement—one that incorpo-
rates disability justice, that centers disabled people of color and queer and
gender nonconforming folks with disabilities—our species might have a
chance to survive.
Wendy: Reflecting on bodies and health in this discussion, I would like

to add my reflections here about embodying degrowth. The idea of
growth reproduces its hegemony through everyday practices and perfor-
mances. In unsettling notions of gender, race, heteronormativity, and
able-bodiedness we need to delink from the everyday invisibilising of
difference. In the invitation to notice the everyday and embody degrowth,
FPE takes up feminist decolonial meanings of seeing the body as a place
from where we can start telling stories and find inner strength. As Ilenia
indicates, FPE invites cultural and political resistance to the dominant
patriarchal (medicalised and racialised) understanding of the “normal”
body as white, male, Western, and heterosexual from which all “other”
forms of bodies differ. This form of body politics opens a space for trans-
formative collective action which connects the body to radical alternatives
offered by degrowth, asking that radical change be founded on diversity
and the need for care of our own and other bodies, paying attention to
the silencing of difference.
As Stefania and Giovanna have underlined, FPE further invites
degrowth to be open to the possibility of talking about other worlds and
about knowledge otherwise in order to unsettle dominant views of what
it is to be human from world views outside the colonial frame. We need
to understand how to work both across and outside a colonial frame;
what are the possibilities of undoing and unsettling—not replacing or
occupying —Euro-American conceptions of what it means to be human.
What would it mean for degrowth to take on black feminist and science
studies concepts of unsettling in order to constructively shift Eurocentric
positions of degrowth?
In these invitations, FPE is looking at ways of relating, undoing the
imaginary of growth through everyday practices. Learning from decolo-
nial and Indigenous feminisms, ideas of relationality, responsibility, and
conviviality, and walking with others in allyship, FPE’s invitation is to
move towards a resurgence of other ways of doing and thinking. FPE
invites an openness to a plurality of perspectives and the resurgence of
resistances through degrowth. Together, FPE and degrowth can build a
shared, pluriversal project, capable of being home to diverse knowledge,
languages, memories, and perspectives.
Conclusion
Using the 8th International Degrowth Conference as a springboard,
in this chapter we explored the themes of care and caring communi-
ties and radical change from FPE perspectives and how they contribute
to degrowth debates. As our chapter indicates, FPE perspectives are
informed by diverse and, at times, conflicting theoretical approaches.
What unites these diverse perspectives are methodological choices such
as learning with marginalised communities, valuing their struggles for
collective well-being, recognising more-than-human earthothers as kin
in collective survival, and looking at context-specific stories as analyt-
ical starting points. We share a relational ontology and belief in the
importance of intersectionality in shaping environmentally just futures. In
200 S. BARCA ET AL.
conclusion we look below at how our considerations for care and caring
communities can strengthen degrowth’s transformative potential.
Our focus in this chapter has been on FPE understandings on care
rooted in our respective experiences with communities of place-based
struggles for social and environmental justice. Care is critically recog-
nised as central to both social and ecological reproduction of humans,
economies, and lifeworlds. What we have pointed to is the radical poten-
tial of care collectively performed by humans with more-than-human
earthothers, in work that is non-hierarchically organised among species
and experienced democratically among communities. This care is a kind
of glue, binding species across differences of all kinds constituted by
kin-centric relationships in place.
Our chapter pointed to examples of such care—Serenity Soular and
CRCQL in the US, earth-carers in the Brazilian Amazon and the
MAKAAM in India. These stories illustrate what caring communities for a
post-capitalist, post-growth present and future look like. Caring commu-
nities challenge the culture of individualism, undoing the geo-supremacy
perspective, and while still working within states. We have pointed to how
caring practices support radical social transformation including degrowth
by forming strong kin-centric relationships. They also develop an ability
to value “forces of reproduction”, which are unseen and devalued in the
capitalist, productivist paradigm (such as unpaid care work performed by
women and others in the marginalised communities). They also address
the discriminations experienced by marginalised communities and the
harm experienced by the environment. Caring practices demand people
and their more-than-human kin entitlements and rights to resources and
ecological health and well-being. We have argued that taking note of
such caring practices is not about romanticising “a community” and
“the commons”, but taking seriously the histories of land and place and
learning from the peoples and earthothers lifeworlds that nourish and
sustain each other over generations.
Our chapter points to the need for degrowth to take into account
caring practices aware of who and what is excluded from transformative
politics. We have pointed out the importance of the embodied experi-
ences of marginalised groups: people with disabilities, queer and gender
nonconforming people, people of colour, women performing industrial
wage labour in working-class communities, their children and nonhuman
animals and life-support systems. We ask that these lives are not marginal
but central to transformative politics. Degrowth needs to take into
account decolonial feminisms, crip theory and anti-essentialist Marxism

as a necessary condition for democratic politics. Radical concepts such as
“commoning”, “community” need to be constantly elaborated to ensure
decolonial, non-capitalocentric perspectives are at the heart of degrowth
critiques and transformative practices. Finally, we must pay more atten-
tion to our own bodies and our own lifeworlds and their interactions. By
performing care practices together, in place and time, and making critical
connections with earthothers we can produce stronger communities and
movements for radical change.
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206 S. BARCA ET AL.
holder.
CHAPTER 9
Perspectives on Decoloniality for FPE
Dian Ekowati, Marlene Gómez, Iliana Monterroso,

and Ankita Shrestha
Introduction
Our initial motivation to write this piece was to explore some of the
core proposals of decolonial theories that can nurture feminist political
ecology (FPE) theory and practice. But rather than engaging in a dialogue
between FPE and decolonial thinking, which we recognise may be inex-
haustible and therefore too vast for the scope of this chapter, we choose
instead to piece together some of our intimate understandings of decolo-
nial thought. The chapter is organised around four pieces that reflect
aspects of the personal intellectual journey of the writer through their
epistemic relationship with different experiences and understandings of
coloniality, or, put simply, their reality as researchers.
The order of the authors is alphabetical order. It does not reflect the
commitment and responsibilities of authors’ contributions.
D. Ekowati
WEGO Innovative Training Network, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK
e-mail: Dee.ekowati@gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_9
Our aim is to be transparent to the reader about the ‘places we come

from’, both conceptual and literal, and therefore ‘situate’ ourselves in
each of our reflections to show who is speaking from where. This chap-
ter’s layout also brings out the multiple voices and perspectives underlying
the different colonial realities we all live as researchers from the ‘global’
South, navigating between research and activism. Each piece however
discusses different issues. Through our effort to write a joint chapter for
our collective, we acknowledged that our individual and unique trajec-
tories have shaped how we understand the concepts of coloniality and
how we subsequently attempt to decolonise our areas of research and
ourselves. We think that our differences, which, instead of listing here,
we seek to allow our readers to explore for themselves, are an outcome
of thinking through decoloniality. Although the texts here may read as
disconnected for those reasons, we do this exercise not just to bring forth
the multiple interpretations of how decoloniality may be conceptualised,
but also to highlight how both FPE and decolonial thinking can accom-
modate the many, and often contradictory, strands of non-extractive
research approaches under the same roof.
Ankita Shrestha: On Coloniality

and the Political Subject
To think ‘the other’ in a colonially drenched epistemic thought is to think
of the other as an object (Mbembe, 2001). This ‘otherness’ is inflicted
upon the native body in a colonial encounter. The coloniser appears with
force, either with guns and artillery, or with knowledge that the native
M. Gómez (B)
I. Monterroso
Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia
e-mail: I.Monterroso@cgiar.org
A. Shrestha
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: anki.shrestha@gmail.com
9 PERSPECTIVES ON DECOLONIALITY FOR FPE 209
must contend with. The coloniser does not ask for the native’s permis-
sion; the coloniser simply violates. In this affliction, they force the native
to accept their fate of becoming a colonised, native body—the other. In
birthing the body of the ‘native’ into existence, the coloniser forges a
common history in which he (sic) “owes the fact of his very existence
to the colonial system” (Fanon, 2001, p. 28). Here, the nature of the
encounter becomes almost irrelevant momentarily, as whether by force or
with consent, neither the native nor the coloniser are the same again.
How then does one define coloniality1 in a country like Nepal, one
of the rare small nations that resisted all European colonial powers? The
narrative of the ‘post-colonial’ nation has decidedly not been applicable
to Nepal and has been reserved for neighbouring India and other smaller
nations of South Asia that were actual colonies once. Yet, the ahistorical2
technicality of being a sovereign nation sits oddly with the way develop-
mentalist projects of modernity grips the imagination of an entire people
and dictates its government. Complex relations of caste, class, religion,
and gender lay bare, and often brutally so, the multiple dimensions of
coloniality experienced in everyday social and political relations today.
Below, I attempt to put forward my interpretation of who the ‘decolo-
nial’ political subject could be, as I seek to avoid universalising all colonial
experiences and to contribute to colonial scholarship that provides space
for multiple temporalities to come forth.
The Decolonial Subject

Let us ask first who is the decolonial subject. Here, we are asking two
ontologically motivated questions—who the subject is and what is the
decolonial. The subject, in a most reductively poststructural sense, can
be conceptualised as an individual, a body capable of engaging in power
relations (Lukes, 2005) and of rejecting them (Butler, 2006). Outside a
1 Aníbal Quijano’s conceptualisation of ‘modernity/coloniality’ puts forward the idea

of coloniality not merely as the state of being a colony but also refers to an epistemic
form of colonisation through which Eurocentric ideologies such as modernity overpowers
all other forms of epistemes.
2 The colonisation of indigenous populations during the imperial campaign of the Shah
rulers eventually led to the project of the modern Nepali nation-state (Regmi, 1999).
These temporalities are often not seen as processes of colonisation because of the absence
of its ‘white European’ coloniser at the centre.
phallocentric view of the subject, it is also a sexual body, whose differ-

ence against another body is characterised through the categories of male
or female (Irigaray, 1995) or through historical constructs of gender
(Mohanty, 1988, 2003) that not just inform struggles of identity and
representation but also reveal the political economy of subsequent knowl-
edge production (Asher, 2017). In a more existentialist view, which is
of consequence here, the subject is a person, a sentient being, a body
among bodies (Jung, 1996). But against dualistic views of the body as our
medium into the world, or, put simply, our way of experiencing the world
and of making sense of it, it is important to radicalise the body as not
separate from but immanent to the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005) in
order to think the ‘decolonial’. For using the word decolonial today is to
speak foremost of an attitude towards viewing the post-colonial world as
a thinking people (Walsh & Mignolo, 2018), a people historically altered
by the colonial encounter, but moving, for those exact reasons, towards
a world which is not defined by (or reduced to) a colonial caricature,
an epistemic residue of the coloniser, but by an ontological rebirthing
of the native reality. In other words, it is an act—in thought and move-
ment—that attempts to shed the colonial remnants of a brutal force that
dominated, dehumanised, and decapitated the native body, to relive as
the body.
If all three interpretations of the subject listed above could be distilled
down to one, we could then say that by the very fact that it exists, acts,
and through action (or the decision to not act), the subject occurs. We
interpret the ‘decolonial subject’ then as follows. The decolonial subject
acts to recuperate the body from coloniality (Quijano, 2000), an onto-
logical imposition of the colonial encounter that irrevocably changed
the social, economic, cultural, and, above all, epistemic systems of the
colonised world such that Europe, or the geophysical spaces of the
colonisers, and its ideals of modernity, became the cornerstone for all
modes of civilisation that followed (Bhambra, 2014). The decolonial body
then acknowledges colonisation as a historical process understood “in the
exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it histor-
ical form and content” (Fanon, 2001, p. 27). Such movements must
include, then, contingencies that skip the form and content that make up
history, for these contingencies, although they are left outside the margins
of history, are scarcely forgotten by the body. Indeed, everyday histories
are resurrected in the experiential body; as such it does not experience

coloniality but is that very experience, marked by temporal contingencies
of colonial encounters that continue to occur in everyday life.
The Political Subject

If the task for the decolonising body is to recuperate the body, I contend
that it needs the political. The ‘political’ is emphasised here as a body
occurring as an ontological rather than an epistemic necessity. In the post-
colonial world, this ‘political’ body is underscored by coloniality, through
which colonial power regimes are not only reproduced in everyday
human relations but encounters with the colonial past are also perpetu-
ally renewed in different relational spaces in the present (Mbembe, 2001).
This ‘political’ body is therefore a body of multiplicities, unforgiving and
unforgetting, because it refuses to be forgotten or forgiven itself, and
yet also a body of possibilities capable of putting aside the burden that
history has put on its shoulders. Without the political, the decolonising
body, limited in its efforts to overturn the epistemic systems of power in
society, culture, and the environment that persist under the paradigm of
modernity, is restricted to the will to power, motivated either towards the
obliteration or negation of the other (Sartre, 2007) or the transformation
into the other (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). To reject assimilating the subject
into the folds of coloniality/modernity is therefore not enough, as this
cannot simply be achieved by reversing power orders or replacing power
structures (Mbembe, 2001). I put forward then that the decolonial aim,
instead of succumbing to the telos of power, could shift to transcending
the limits of the decolonial body itself, as the political. This political body
is motivated by the will to power which, however, is also the will to tran-
scend itself (Nietzsche, 1967). I propose then that the decolonial subject
extends itself towards the political, as it forces us to re-evaluate the cate-
gories of ‘I’ against ‘the other’ upon which the colonial encounter was
legitimised; a political reimagination of these relations forces thus to think
through the lens of forged realities, for the post-colonial world neither
‘belongs to’ the colonised or the coloniser but recreates itself every day
through the body.
Valorising colonial encounters as a necessary step towards thinking of
the other is not, however, the attempt of the decolonial thinking engaged
here, and neither is the attempt being made to recognise colonial encoun-
ters as the only way to think of the other. I attempt here to facilitate an
existential imagination of the decolonial subject such that we render the

decolonial subject political. I use the word render not to suggest that the
decolonial subject needs either to be reduced or refined to bring it to
an altered, higher state of ‘being political’. This would be tantamount to
saying that other interpretations of the political, of the epistemic revolt
and social movements of subversion of power that the decolonial world
has been engaged in already for decades, are somehow inadequate or
not worth pursuing. It is however to say rather defiantly that seeing the
decolonial as political could help to bring this high pursuit of the decolo-
nial project down to a more minuscule, everyday level of individuals
capable of mutating into ‘the political’.
Iliana Monterroso: On
the Making of Political Subjects
This piece explores how these different understandings of the decolo-
nial thought materialise in practice, and how feminist perspectives around
the decolonial and political ecology can further our understanding of
the political. The following section is based on personal engagement
with research and development practice around forests. I was born and
raised in the Guatemalan highlands in Totonicapan, an Indigenous region
where forests are managed as Parcialidades.3 Forests are not only the
focus of my research, rather, but they also represent a sense of place
and reference point that has strongly influenced my professional career.
Indigenous forests in the highlands became the flagship of the K’iche’
People,4 a stronghold for Indigenous authority systems over forests,
lands, and water resources. In this text, I argue that decolonial thought
and practice emerge from and help understand the making of forests and
those inhabiting forestlands as political subjects (Springate-Baginszki &
Blaikie, 2013). I contend that struggles around the political forests and
forest people are closely embedded in processes of constant negotiation
of power and assertion of authority and legitimacy of both knowl-
edge and practice. This entails the recognition of forests as relational
places, inquiring about the boundaries of forest ecosystems as defined
3 Parcialidades are forest systems managed as commons, with rights grounded on the
negotiation of land titles since colonial times. These forests are governed by complex
institutional arrangements based on kinship (Reddy, 2002).
4 One of the Mayan ethnic groups recognised by the Guatemalan State.
by ecological and biophysical terms (Nightingale, 2018). Shaped also

by the social norms, practices, and relations between humans and non-
humans, the forest is itself embedded in power struggles and processes of
territorialisation (Loivaranta, 2020).
Situated Engagement with Decolonial Thought and Forests

Colonial histories frame the way forests, and those women and men
inhabiting forestlands, become political subjects. However, while some
progress has been argued in forest studies, feminist decolonial and polit-
ical ecology perspectives show the need to decolonise practices that
continue commodifying forestlands and exacerbate exclusionary practices
that reduce forests to commodities and forest people to environmentally
responsible subjects (Agrawal & Bauer, 2005). This has implications both
for framing our theoretical and methodological understanding of forests
and for those living and depending on these resources. I start by laying
out my journey into the studies of forests and those living in forestlands.
I pursued undergraduate studies in Biology as part of a US scholar-
ship programme for Central American students. On my return, I joined
a community forestry research programme. I travelled to the Guatemalan
lowlands in the north, a frontier tropical forest region. I conducted
community training in both the highlands and the lowlands. The contrast
in forest landscapes in these two regions was as diverse as the social
processes and community organisation I encountered. My understanding
of forestlands as places for colonisation, management, and/or conserva-
tion shifted as I came to see them also as places of identity, history, and
social relations. Forests became not only an issue of biophysical concern
but rather highly contested and political spaces. Later, I travelled to
Europe, to pursue postgraduate studies. I was drawn by critical perspec-
tives of Latin American ecological economists and political ecologists
like Leff, Escobar, and Alimonda who not only questioned mainstream
perspectives but also provided situated knowledge to understand the
complex histories (Escobar, 2006).
I kept relationships with local, forest, community, and Indigenous
organisations, amazed by their diverse practices and histories. I worked
with forest, environmental and biophysical scientists. Not all of them
acknowledge the contextual elements of forests—the contested interests
around them, the diverse knowledge local people had of them. In the
field, until recently, I found very few women leaders, researchers, and
practitioners. I was left with the feeling that research lagged far behind the
processes of mobilisation and social change. My research work expanded
to other countries that required engaging with other histories. This meant
a constant process of unlearning practices of research, questioning the
theoretical and methodological framings I used, and contrasting my own
experiences (Asher, 2017).
The making of political forests and those of forest peoples provide
examples of where and how feminist political perspectives can further
avoid exclusionary narratives in the context of research around forests.
Feminist decolonial and political ecology perspectives can better explain
how forests can become a tool of power and what this implies for the
recognition of social and political subjects. First, different territoriali-
sation practices imply processes of negotiating authority and legitimacy
that determines who can engage in these debates. Second, forest dwellers
and their struggle to assert their recognition as political subjects, have
long been framed by technical perspectives that have reduced what can
be considered a forest, who can be considered a forest community, and
for what purposes a forest is used. These reflections highlight how FPE
perspectives can inform decolonial thinking, providing approaches to
better understand processes of ‘decolonization of the self’ that go from
‘becoming the subject’ into being political.
The Making of Political Subjects in Forest Landscapes

The making of the political forests is closely linked to issues of legit-
imacy, what is legitimate and how legitimacy is constructed (Fraser,
2015; Habermas, 1975). Elements in contemporary governmental assem-
blages—“discourses, institutions, forms of expertise and social groups
whose deficiencies need to be corrected”—are also evident in the extent
to which these social groups have gained statutory formal recognition
of their governance structures and their ability to engage with state and
market actors (Li-Murray, 2014, p. 263). This framing of governance has
been criticised for the instrumental and managerial approach, that focuses
on prediction and lacks a proper understanding of the historical processes
that shape power relations in which governance structures are embedded
(Arts, 2014).
Differing from the Guatemalan highlands, the northern forests had
long been considered hinterlands awaiting the modernising presence of
the State. As in other tropical forests regions, commoditisation of forests,
e.g., through the creation of markets for forest ecosystem services and
other conditional incentive programmes to mitigate climate change, put
forests back in the centre of national state and international policies
(Sikor, 2010). However, very different approaches have been taken where
options do not align with market and conservation interests. In the high-
lands and eastern forest regions of Guatemala, access and control of
forests remain highly contested and often violently restrained (Ekern,
2006). In the north, conservation policies recognising forest communi-
ties as protected areas were established and different management models
were discussed to recognise “environmental subjects”. Forest communi-
ties’ identities and knowledge systems were deemed interesting vehicles
for implementing state forest policies (Agrawal & Bauer, 2005). This
process of subject-making of forest-dependent groups shaped the estab-
lishment of protected areas, legitimising state authority in these forest
hinterlands aligned with state conservation policies.
Power struggles underlying the contestation and negotiation process
that followed the social mobilisation process often homogenised commu-
nity groups, and diluted the diversity of age, gender, and ethnicity,
reducing the ability to address underlying social differentiation and exclu-
sion issues (Ybarra, 2017). In some regions, establishing arrangements
between the state and the communities kept some communities from
being evicted. In others, protected areas meant enclosures; green grabs
that resulted in violent dispossessions with negative consequences for
Indigenous communities, who were often portrayed as driving deforesta-
tion (Grandia, 2012; Ybarra, 2017). This shows how colonial legacies of
structural racism strongly influence governmental environmental assem-
blages, creating new political subjects as needed and shaping them in such
a way that maintains discriminatory practices and sustains extraction.
Divergent interests and power struggles have shaped which social
groups are given the legitimacy to claim contested resources in forests. In
the case of forest-dependent communities, the process was legitimised by
the state and conservation NGOs based on their ability to meet conser-
vation goals, often measured by deforestation rates, while at the same
time this process consolidated protected areas as territorialisation policies.
International policies that sought to consolidate state authority in forest
frontier regions enforced these practices. This renewed interest in forests,
as evident during COP 26, claims to recognise Indigenous peoples’ role
of “forest guardianship”. However, engaging Indigenous peoples in these
forest and climate change governance processes is closely tied to their
recognition as political subjects. Recognising forest peoples as political

subjects must entail decolonising existing technocratic approaches around
forests, pushing the boundaries of both research and practice. As Mignolo
would argue (2017), this requires “epistemic reconstitutions” to “change
the structure of knowledge” challenged by decolonial epistemologies
underlying the way we engage with forests.
Marlene Gomez: On Body, Territory, and Care

My first approach to decolonial theories began when I was 22 years
old. Back then, I was engaged with environmental movements and
peasant activism. I was also critical of the capitalist way of life—uncon-
sciously consuming products in mass—and I tried to alter and reduce my
consumption habits. I tried to live this way during my time as an under-
graduate, until I came across Latin American decolonial theories that
opened my comprehension of the real crisis we were living in, which is
not only institutional but civilisational. Reading Quijano, Lander, Walsh,
Acosta and other decolonial thinkers informed me that the colonisation
of Abya Yala5 (America) was only possible through the imposition of a
modern rationality that comes along with the hierarchisation of societies
based on racism, command–obedience relationships, gender differences,
and the exploitation of nature. This modern rationality is Eurocentric,
capitalist, and patriarchal and organises the modern world through the
validity of epistemologies and ontologies developed in Europe. Back then,
approaching decolonial theory upended my project to save the planet by
contesting State politics and made me question privileges, positionalities,
and possibilities, turning towards how we could care for others and the
planet along with a process of decolonisation.
In this piece, I want to focus on the proposals of decolonial feminism
in three different strands: the body, territory-territoriality, and care for
and with the other. These proposals show that caring for the planet and
others are related to the ways we engage with the world in our everyday
life. Firstly, I will draw on the body as a scale of collective resistance, a
host of diversity, and a vehicle for caring for and with others. Secondly, I
will explore notions of territoriality that show relational and plural under-
standings of life. Thirdly, I will briefly touch upon political projects that
5 As this territory was named by the Second Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples
and Nationalities in 2004.
decolonial feminism envisions as caring pluriverses. This way, I will try to

present narrative others that aim to dismantle care as a pure class-based
or economic relation and position it as a powerful vehicle for social trans-
formation. By this, I do not mean to neglect what feminist economists
eloquently inform us about care and how it changes along lines of gender
and race, producing labour inequalities. However, I want to draw on
narratives that imagine care as work decentred from economic dynamics
and out of the realm of homo economicus. Clues for this can be found
not only in decolonial feminism, but also in feminist political ecologies,
post-capitalist approaches, the commons, and other approaches that look
at the roots of communitarian bonds to rebuild the social fabric based on
careful collective values among people and the environment.
Situating Decolonial Feminism

Dismantling the patterns of power that constitute the modern world is the
challenge of decolonial feminism in Latin America or Abya Yala. Decolo-
nial feminism is not only a social movement, but also “a symbolic space of
cultural affirmation, identity formation, knowledge production, and social
and political action” (López Nájera, 2014, p. 108). Questioning patterns
of power such as race, sex, gender, class, and ethnicity, which hierar-
chically organise societies, decolonial feminism shows the multiple facets
that systems of oppression exert in our bodies, territories, and everyday
life (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014). Taking up the knowledge, practices, and
organisational forms of original peoples, decolonial feminism seeks to give
a pluricultural, epistemological, and ontological recognition of the diverse
identities, struggles, and resistances that make up the territory of Abya
Yala (Cumes, 2009). Under threat from oppressive or colonial power
structures, listening to common sense, recognising knowledge produc-
tion in daily practices, and embracing plural dialogues and imaginaries, are
the vehicles and tools that nourish a political project for change. Nowa-
days, the constant struggle against femicides, sexual and gender violence,
inequalities, and the disciplining of bodies unite the cuir, trans, lesbian,
anti-colonial, and decolonial feminisms of the region.
The Body
Decolonial feminism explores how violence is inscribed in bodies as a
colonial legacy. Decolonial feminists work to make visible bodies fleeing
from the heterosexual regime, gender inequalities, white hierarchies,
body consumption, and coloniality (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014) in a world
where the body is a container of systems of oppression and hierar-
chies, besieged by multiple violences. Understanding the modern body
as a colonial legacy allows us to understand it in relation to a terri-
tory which was also colonised. The body, from a decolonial and feminist
decolonial perspective, is a microscale of the colonised territory of Abya
Yala and globalised hierarchies of race and phenotype (Quijano, 2009;
Segato, 2004). The global imposition of modernity introduced a binary
understanding of life within societies ruled under the complementary of
dualities (Lander, 1997; Segato, 2004). This reconfigured the relation-
ships between subjects and nature, bringing the Cartesian model as the
legitimate method to understand and engage with life. Through the body,
it is possible to inhabit the colonisation of lands and nature that provokes
displacements and the introduction of external ways of life that create
conflict and violence.
However, with the body we take the streets, we defend lands from
mining, we resist the Other, and we practise care for and with others. This
is possible because the body is built through reciprocal practices among
humans and material and immaterial components of life that are orally and
corporally defended. We can see this in intergenerational practices that
protect collective histories and in social imaginaries that inhabit and prac-
tice ways of life that resist subsumption to colonisation, such as cultural
identities and political projects like the sentipensar, Buen Vivir, or Sumak
Kawsay. This is not far from thinking that the body is permeable (Marcos,
2008) meaning it is open; created and recreated by a constant contagion
and complementarity with other bodies. Following this, we can assert
that the body is in constant historical and political production, through
which it can resist and become one of the material vehicles for social
transformation. Through our body we show our story and negotiate how
we inhabit space and resist invisibilisations. Through feelings, discom-
fort, and hierarchies, the body is intersected by patterns of power that
are historically related to our territory; patterns which trigger a system-
atic increase of violence. This informs how the history of communities is
inscribed in the bodies of the people who inhabit them: we see this in the
thick hands of a care worker washing other people’s clothes, in the rough
hands of a peasant, or in the hands of a woman who daily carries water in
long distances. Through the expansion of colonisation, the body contin-
uously becomes a territory of conquest, but also a territory of resistance,
where patterns of power and systems of oppression are daily inhabited,
perceived, and experienced but also negotiated through skin colour, daily
habits, diets, language/accents, among others.
Territory-Territoriality
The analysis of the territory in decolonial theories questions the tradi-
tional understanding of territory as a place delimited by borders that
contains a fixed and neutral nation-state. Critiques of this understanding
argue that the nation-state is a political force based on modern prac-
tices that homogenise subjects and territories, masked as citizenship and
acculturation (Yuval-Davis, 1993). Decolonial feminism is situated in this
critical strand and, influenced by Indigenous, peasant, and other diverse
movements, considers the territory to be a living place that obtains
meaning through the bodies that wander, defend, and resist with it. For
this notion, the territory is a tool of power and not a fixed container of
it, regulated only by institutional norms and legal frameworks. To the
contrary, the territory is a place of contingencies, contradictions, and
antagonisms that allow for transformations, joy, and convivialities that
construct the meaning of the nation-state. Although the territory is the
space that can be conquered, it is also the place that witnesses resistance
and negotiation. This is possible because the territory is part of the social
fabric, along with the rest of the components of life—water, plants, and
everything that composes the socio-natural network. For such a concep-
tion of the territory, the notion of community plays an important role,
meaning that life is built in a co-constitutional and relational way among
humans and among humans and nature.
By thinking of the territory as a living space, we must acknowledge its
capacity for mobility, a characteristic called territoriality. The experiences
of communality, a political project of peasants and Indigenous peoples
in Oaxaca, Mexico demonstrates this notion: these communities under-
stand territoriality by the four pillars that compose the community: the
assembly, the territory, the festivities, and the tequio or community work
(Luna, 2003), practices that are inhabited by the bodies and social fabric
of the community members. What gives the idea of mobility to territo-

riality is the fact that these practices can be brought along wherever the
community members go by their orality, behaviour, imaginaries, and ways
to relate to the territory. In this comprehension, territoriality is never
neutral; by its mobility, it is intersected by patterns of power, systems
of oppression, and violence that bodies experience in conditions of race,
class, gender, ethnicity, among others. Thus, the body and the territory
are co-constitutional of a reciprocal life and are travellers through our
territoriality; so is the way we relate to the place where we are.
Caring for and with

Within decolonial feminism, the debate on care work is a central axis
composed of different strands. Some understand care from a feminist
economic perspective and highlight the role of productive and repro-
ductive work within a patriarchal framework (Díaz, 2009; Henrich,
2016). The dialogue with Black feminism nurtures decolonial feminism
through intersectionality, emphasising patterns of power and colonial
legacies that keep care work dynamics unequal. Decolonial feminism
notes that care needs to be critically rethought from a communitarian
perspective (Millán, 2019) and through using critical pedagogy (Walsh,
2015) where the environment plays a central role. In this debate,
domestic economic units, solidarity economy, reciprocity, and Sumak
Kawsay/Suma Qamaña, and Vivir Bien practices, question the relation-
ships, dynamics, and ethics of care through which we relate as humans
and to the components of life. Here, the subject is one that feels and
that claims the right to live in dignity among other subjects and nature
in a relational manner. However, these practices have undergone a strong
critique from decolonial feminism since they are in most cases subsistence
work carried out through unequal dynamics and by diverse subjects. Here,
just as in households, gender identities and working roles are constructed,
reinforced, and configured that make care relations unequal and prob-
lematic. The proposal for this is to reassess and rearticulate care dynamics
from a collective perspective where care is not unidirectional but multi-
directional (Gómez-Becerra & Muneri-Wangari, 2021) in connection to
body and territory needs.
Situating struggles historically and geographically allows us to illumi-
nate how care practices are negotiated through the politics of everyday
life, the body, and the territory. Decolonial feminists make the call to
think about care relations from reciprocity and solidarity through which
we can consolidate collective caring practices. Questioning who is able
to enter into the dynamics of care, how care is exercised, and why it is
needed must be a daily practice, wherein a collective manner of relating
to subjects and nature sets the pace for these relationships. Care cannot
be seen anymore as a human-centred relation, but as an expanded rela-
tional practice nurtured and contested by diverse bodies, territories, and
territorialities. Once we collectivise care practices, they can act as one of
the vehicles to decolonise our everyday experience of colonial legacies,
immersed in modern, Eurocentrist, capitalist, and patriarchal relations,
bodies, territories, and institutions.
Dian Ekowati: On Care

in the Indonesian Oil Palm Community
My Understanding of Decoloniality
I was first exposed to the idea of decoloniality when I started my PhD
in feminist political ecology in 2019. I remembered that one of the first
articles I read on decolonial ideas was from Chandra Talpade Mohanty:
in her article Under Western Eyes (Mohanty, 1988), she eloquently argues
against the monolithic categorisation of “Third World Women” and
the othering, colonial assumption behind this categorisation. Later on,
when I read Edward Said’s work of post-colonial theory, “Introduction
to Orientalism” (Said, 1978), and Linda Tuhiwai Smith “Decolonising
Methodologies” (Smith, 2012), I was exposed to similar conceptions of
“otherness”.
Throughout my Ph.D. I read works from other scholars who also
work on the Indonesian oil palm industry, had a similar organisational
background in development and who shared the spirit of decoloniality.
I found this excerpt to sum up what I feel at this stage of my life and
career/study as a fourth-year Ph.D. student about being a decolonial
feminist researcher.
The commitment to change and attention to the relationships with

research subjects are key to feminist research. Practices of reflexivity
– researchers reflecting on their positionality, critically examining
the research process, and the commitment to change (Hesse-Biber,
2014), and attention to the relationships between the researcher and
the research subjects (Stacey, 1988; Nagar, 2003; Craven & Davis,
2013)—stand out as the defining characteristics of feminist research.
(Resurrección & Elmhirst, 2020, p. 151, emphasis added)
I use the excerpt as a reminder of how significant positionality and reflex-

ivity are in looking at the research process and commitment to change,
something that I find resonant with the commitments behind decolonial
ideas; despite the fact that none of the above authors mention the term
“decolonial” in their chapter.
Below is my attempt to be reflexive towards my own positionality as an
attempt to decolonise my research on the topic of care in the Indonesian
oil palm community. I explain this by looking back and looking forward
at my life stage, work, and research journey, hopefully to ease the reader
in understanding which is my reflective and reflexive attempt (looking
back), and which is my decolonial attempt (looking forward).
Looking Back: Reflecting on My Positionality

My positionality affects the way I make sense of the topic of my research
on care, and engaging reflectively with my positionality and realising the
power relations between researcher and subjects are the first steps towards
thinking decolonially.
I remember proposing beyond human care at the start of my Ph.D.
Later on, when I was in Indonesia, I decided to change my focus to care
in everyday life, as I found the meaning of care in the oil palm context
as imagined by Global North consumers did not travel well to the actual
communities of oil palm producers in the Global South. My position as an
“insider” to the experience of everyday care in the communities I worked
with drove me to that change. I was born and raised in a small village
without electricity until I was 11 years old. This experience is essential
in my research practice since not having access to electricity is often the
most notable aspect mentioned by local communities when they speak
about the feeling of being “backward” or in the dark (Elmhirst et al.,
2017). My parent’s home did not have household appliances (e.g., fridge,
washing machine, cooker) until I was 23 years old. I helped my mother
(my father did little care work for his children) to care for my two younger
siblings (with a three- and twelve years age gap). I find the experience of
caring for young children and not having access to appliances is essential
in my understanding of care. Domestic work is mundane, exhausting, and

mainly undervalued; despite it being vital to care for and maintain life.
Later on, I got married and had two young children. Today, I have
both the experiences of living every day with care support and the experi-
ence of lacking support, due to COVID, finances, and life circumstances.
During COVID, my husband and I worked full-time from home while
taking care of our 1.5- and 7-year-old children. Schools and childcare
were closed, and we could not ask our caretaker to come to our place
in order to avoid risks (for our caretaker and for us). It was hard, phys-
ically and emotionally, especially since the four of us were living in our
two-bedroom house with little outdoor space.
This embodied experience as a daughter, sibling, wife, and mother with
and without care support, shaped my understanding as “insider” to my
own research on everyday care realities and challenges.
Throughout my life, I have had the privilege to travel and learn from
agricultural, forest, and oil palm communities, mostly in Indonesia. My
position is not always the same and my relationship with oil palm commu-
nities has been different from what I have now, i.e., as a Ph.D. researcher
trying to understand various oil palm community’s care discourses using
online videos/documents. I had been working as a junior researcher and
research assistant in national and international universities and NGOs for
almost 15 years before starting my Ph.D. I did fieldwork and during
my work planning6 I often had an awkward mixed feeling of desire to
help the community while recognising that our institution’s worldview
and methods were undermining the community’s worldview. Sometimes
this was not something we intended, but pressure from the donor and
project budget and timelines often left us no room to think or do other-
wise. Later, when we would visit the community, there was often another
awkwardness—the community called us all from “Jakarta ‘’ or the “cen-
tre”, while they are in the “margin”, they are “the other”; implying
that we are different, worlds apart. Jakarta is Indonesia’s capital, where
power, information, and facilities are centred. Carol J. Pierce Colfer, a
researcher focused on gender and development, describes a similar feeling
of awkwardness and power differentials in the context of her work with
forest communities (Resurrección & Elmhirst, 2020).
6 Where I mostly did not have a voice in the work objectives and approach—I saw
myself as in the margin due to my Indonesian education/work background, as a young
woman and in my position as assistant/junior.
Other than this, I am of the Javanese ethnicity—Javanese are seen

as the “whites” of Indonesia, in the sense of occupying the majority
and living where power is centred, but also as one ethnicity that is
often seen as most patriarchal in Indonesia. On top of that, I am a
Moslem (the majority faith in Indonesia). There are long colonial histor-
ical instances of oppression and discrimination from Javanese ethnicity
(the centre) towards other7 ethnicities and Moslem (the centre) towards
other8 faiths.
All these reflections on positionality and my journey with decoloniality
remind me of the terrible feeling about how our team did our work
before. How we saw the “other” in the communities we worked with,
how the “others” were different from us, and how sometimes I witnessed
that our team leader did something that they would not do to us, but
our leader did to the community anyway. This is something that I am not
proud of remembering up to this day. I remembered in one instance, my
senior lecturer who led the community visit was welcomed by an Indige-
nous leader on his porch, where they sat for two hours. When we left, this
lecturer said “See, I can already make five journal papers about this adat
(Indigenous) community from my two-hours talk with him”. I remem-
bered being so puzzled by his comments, although I did not have the
vocabulary of ‘extractive’ and ‘colonised’ research to describe them back
then.
My position as both an “insider” and a researcher exposed me to
other forms of coloniality in research: in 2021, several researchers from
the Global North expressed their frustration at not being able to enter
Indonesia for research (one asked me personally about possible strategies
to enter). This was at a time when COVID was at its peak, and deaths
in Indonesia were exorbitant. I was puzzled by these questions, on how
these researchers blatantly ignore the health risk they would bring to the
community.
7 Other is in bold to show that all other ethnicities other than Java in Indonesian is
“the other” in the sense of “othering” as in post-colonial and decolonial works.
8 Other is in bold to show that all other faith other than Islam in Indonesian is “the
other” in the sense of “othering” as in post-colonial and decolonial works.
Looking Forward: Situating Positionality and Reflexivity

in Decolonialising Research
I ask myself; how do I perform decolonial research? Which, in line with
my journey above, I translate to “How does one do careful research
without extracting and colonising the community, bringing marginal
voices to the centre; all during the pandemic time?”.9 In my field-
work, this entails visiting remotely located oil palm communities, and in
Indonesia, it means very little to no access to health facilities.
In a different context, it reminds me of what Linda Tuhiwai Smith
mentioned in her book about how colonisers (who judged their mission
as much more important than Indigenous people’s lives) sent infected
blankets to Indigenous peoples in the First Nations of Canada (2012,
p. 65). Therefore, I decided not to judge my research as so crucial that
risking others’ life is acceptable. This ethical stance led me to decide not
to do my research face to face even when travel restrictions were relaxed
by the Indonesian Government.
With this realisation, I decided on a YouTube ethnography, where I
follow some young women oil palm farmers. They regularly post videos
on their public channels (with millions of subscribers and hundreds of
thousands of views of each video they post) about their everyday life as oil
palm farmers in different places in Indonesia. I made a deliberate choice to
follow young women who make public YouTube videos and who identify
themselves as oil palm farmers. I made these choices as my research is
about care and women traditionally carry more care burdens.
In deciding on everyday YouTube ethnography, I made a deliberate
decision to only choose the channels that were intentionally setting their
YouTube for wide audiences/public settings and to focus on voices that
rarely make their way to centre stage in oil palm discourse: those of
women and youth. Furthermore, in Indonesia, local YouTube channels
are mediums that capture a lot of audiences across Indonesia. Indonesian
mobile internet service provides many affordable YouTube packages for
its users. However, this voice rarely enters mainstream discourse, either in
academics or policy.
9 Questions surrounding non-extractive research during pandemic times was also asked
by Dupuis in her research with aged people (in Harcourt et al., 2022).
On the flipside, I ask about the ethics of “lurking” these spaces

and the border between public and personal space of these persons I
watch/observe (Morrow et al., 2015) something that I continue to reflect
on now when I write this piece.
Conclusion
Through this chapter, we intend to contribute to the growing South–
South dialogues which contest colonial and neo-colonial social and
political structures in order to create a shared decolonial future. In our
different interpretations of this decolonial future, we see a common spirit
that links us all to FPE’s attempts to grapple with complex questions
of who the subject can be, and how to think about care for a common
world. Our aim is to expose our different interpretations as a necessary
step to engaging different ways not just of thinking about and engaging
with decoloniality, but also of articulating these interpretations. These
interpretations are bound within our understanding of the concepts of
subjectivity, the body, and the other. Our diverse understandings bring
our unique research approaches and our visions of decoloniality, which
is why each author speaks in the ‘I’ of the first person. This ‘I’ is also
a unique reflection of our shared understanding of situatedness, that we
understand collectively as our historical and temporal rootedness, and our
shared views on power inequalities that were not just inherent to the colo-
nial world but are fundamental to an ongoing struggle in a post-colonial
world. Our South–South ‘dialogue’, then, is as much a dialogue within
ourselves—our experiences, personal histories, and reflections of our indi-
vidual colonial realities—as it is between our collective interpretations of
them. Our goal is then to be vigilant about our own situated realities
and meaning-making processes, as ethical considerations of care engen-
dered by those meanings and shared subjectivities have shaped our past
and continue to shape our futures.
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holder.
CHAPTER 10
Debating Population in and Beyond

Feminist Political Ecology
Mila Fenner and Wendy Harcourt
Introduction
Population is rarely discussed in feminist political ecology. It is tiptoed
around, perhaps because of all the emotions it evokes. In order to open
up this debate, in this chapter we look at the heated responses to the
renowned feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar, Donna
Haraway’s call to ‘Make Kin Not Babies’ (2015). Disagreements in
academic debates are often motors for new knowledge and understanding
(Collins, 2000, 2002). However, such disagreements can become bogged
down in disciplinary dogma and semi-interpersonal conflict (Barney,
1990; Morgan & Baert, 2015). Constructive dialogue stalls, dismissive
attitudes grow and certain opinions are relegated to the sphere of taboo
M. Fenner · W. Harcourt (B)

International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus,
M. Fenner
e-mail: fenger@iss.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_10
232 M. FENNER AND W. HARCOURT
(Collins, 2002). When conflicting discourses confront each other after

years of effective silence, emotions explode. Donna Haraway experienced
such explosions firsthand when she re-introduced to (anti-racist, anti-
colonial) feminism the proposal that future human population growth
could be detrimental to human and more-than-human life (Clarke &
Haraway, 2018; Haraway, 2015, 2016). For the sake of survival and ‘mul-
tispecies reproductive justice’, Haraway argued that she would like to see
human numbers wind down to around 2 or 3 billion people through a
voluntary reduction in birth rates, especially among the rich (Haraway,
2016, p. 103). Her attempts to bring population concerns back into
feminist discussions were received badly. She was accused of taking “a
decisive turn towards a primitivism-tinged, misanthropic populationism”
and “trafficking irresponsibly in racist narratives” (Lewis, 2017).
Since Malthus, debates about the impact of human population size
on the environment and on the viability of poverty alleviation have held
widely opposing views (Bashford, 2014). In the last few decades, femi-
nist academics have been at the forefront of exposing misogynistic, racist,
and neo-colonial underpinnings of Malthusian thinking and some of
the population programme policies aimed at the global South (Hart-
mann, 1998; Ojeda et al., 2019; Sasser, 2018). As a consequence of
this genealogy of population critique, the possibility that there could be
negative environmental and humanitarian impacts of future increase in
population has been not on the table in feminist thinking on population.
These views are reflected in international policy circles (Campbell,
2007; Coole, 2013; Halfon, 2006). Due to efforts of the international
women’s movement, among others, at the landmark international UN
Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994, inter-
national policy focus moved away from a discourse of the “population
bomb” or “overpopulation” towards the concept of sexual and reproduc-
tive health and rights (SRHR) (Campbell, 2007). Now, with the increased
concern about climate change, environmental degradation, international
migration and growing global poverty and inequality, the population
question is making its return (Coole, 2018).
In this chapter, we explore the explosive responses of feminists to
Donna Haraway’s thesis of “making kin not babies”. We pay attention to
emotions and how they play out in intellectual debates, and in population
debates among feminist thinkers specifically. We do this in an informal
dialogue format, where we engage each other on both a personal and
scholarly level in order to map out the contours of feminist thinking about
10 DEBATING POPULATION IN AND BEYOND FEMINIST … 233
the fraught topic of population growth and population control. As we

explain below, we write from different positionalities and with contrasting
views on population policy. We have tried to meet each other right at the
fault line between our views in order to explore our own emotions around
the population question.
As Kathy Charmaz notes about feminist research writing: ‘Increas-
ingly, we appear in our texts as thinking, acting—and feeling—participants
rather than as disembodied reporters of collected facts. Lines between
the subjective and objective blur’ (Charmaz, 2012, p. 476). Inspired by
this blurring—of subjective and objective, of researcher and researched—
we experiment with a semi-informal dialogic writing style to illustrate the
experiential and embodied nature of doing FPE research. We aim to show
in the chapter how the feminist research process is one of continuous
learning and unlearning.
We have tried to forge a mutual understanding by cutting through
academic disciplinary boundaries and the inevitable use of disciplinary
jargon. Our focal questions are: why is it so hard to engage in dialogue
on population? Has Haraway’s recent call to ‘make kin not babies’ helped
to change this? We are interested to see how emotions can shut down
dialogue and how by paying attention to this we can open up rather than
close debates around population.
We first introduce in more depth how FPE relates to Donna Haraway’s
slogan of ‘Make Kin Not Babies’. We then write about the ways in which
our different positionalities are linked to the divergent views we hold,
before beginning the centrepiece of this chapter: our conversation focused
on conflict and emotions in population debates. We decided to struc-
ture the dialogue under the headings of five ‘primary emotions’: surprise,
anger, fear, sadness and joy, in order to connect our personal experiences
with the different debates in feminist thinking around population.
Feminist Political Ecology

and the Call to ‘Make Kin Not Babies’
FPE scholarship raises questions about methods and ethics that relate
to embodiedness, emotions, subjectivities and intimacy when seeking to
understand environmental questions. Such attention helps us to deal
with difficult questions that must be asked when we wish to engage in
transformative research and to create more equitable worlds (Elmhirst,
2011; Hawkins et al., 2011; Mollett & Faria, 2013; Sundberg, 2004).
FPE “recognizes the interconnectedness of all life and the relevance

of power relations–including gender relations–in decision-making about
the environment” (Rocheleau et al., 1996, p. 296). As such, FPE
scholars have a particular interest in epistemological tensions and embrace
multiple methods and activist work (Harcourt et al., 2022; Richardson-
Ngwenya & Nightingale, 2018). As a field critically concerned with
gender, the environment and reproduction, FPE has engaged in issues
around population (see for example the work of Mehta et al., 2019;
Sasser, 2018). With its focus on emotion, subjectivity and intimacy, an
FPE approach helps us to go below the big picture questions to how
population is shaped on smaller intimate scales. The attention to emotions
allows us to look at how people engaged in debates around population
relate to each other and what epistemological consequences this has had.
Donna Haraway blew new controversy into the population debate
in 2015. As we stated above, the provocations of Haraway and others,
including Adele Clark (Clarke & Haraway, 2018), were met with resis-
tance. In the clash among feminist and environmentalist discourses on
population, Haraway’s intervention is important. Haraway challenges
feminists “to make ‘kin’ mean something other/more than entities tied
by ancestry or genealogy” (Haraway, 2015, p. 161) and to “find ways
to celebrate low birth rates and personal, intimate decisions to make
flourishing and generous lives (including innovating enduring kin—
kinnovating) without making more babies urgently and especially, but not
only, in wealthy high-consumption and misery-exporting regions, nations,
communities, families, and social classes” (Haraway, 2015, p. 164).
What we are also interested in here is how the responses among femi-
nists to this work, both oral and written, have been rife with emotion. The
affection and love many feel for Haraway and her work has informed the
controversy (Hamilton, 2017; Lewis, 2017; Schultz, 2021; Torracinta,
2017; Turner, 2017). And the strength of the response demonstrates the
hold of anti-population policy sentiment by many feminists engaged in
debates on population.
Positioning Ourselves in the Dialogue

Before we dive further into our dialogue about the emotions that have
surfaced around the slogan ‘make kin not babies’, we first need to position
ourselves more transparently, especially as we are using our own emotional
responses as part of the dialogue. Wendy has worked as an activist scholar
with decades of engagement in feminist debates around the colonial, racist

legacy of populationist thought. In her writing and advocacy for sexual
health and reproductive rights issues she has expressed deep concern
about the instrumentalisation of women of colour in discussions of popu-
lation numbers, poverty and environmental degradation (Harcourt, 2009,
2020). Milla is an early career scholar currently conducting her Ph.D.,
is trained in ecology, conservation and demography and is closer to
academic discourses that speak of growing numbers of humans as a likely
future contributor to extreme poverty in certain places and, to a more
limited extent, a potential strain on specific environments.
We have been working together as supervisor and Ph.D. student since
2018, though over these years together we have found ways to go
beyond that specific hierarchical relationship. We engage as two women of
different generations sharing concerns about our health and well-being,
motherhood, and creative expression as well as larger questions around
the climate crisis and environmental harm, activism and the challenges
of working in a neoliberal university environment. Though we came
together in the context of a social science writing project we both start
from different positions academically—Mila from science, Wendy from
the humanities—something which is reflected clearly in the moments of
misunderstanding in the dialogue below. Mila is also trained and works
in theatre. Wendy has been active in transnational feminism with a focus
on body politics as well as feminist political ecology since the late 1980s.
There are other traits which mark our perceptions: we are both white cis
women. Mila is Dutch and Oxbridge trained. Wendy is from Australia and
has lived and worked in Italy and The Netherlands as both an advocate
and academic. And, while we both consider our sexuality fluid, we have
had the privilege to be able to choose and physically bear children and to
raise them with our male partners who are the biological fathers.
Our dialogue is based on three years of discussions as we met in person,
individually and in a feminist discussion group, and online through
COVID times. If one can speak about a methodology underlying this
dialogue, it was about giving ourselves time to listen to each other’s
approach and be patient with the other’s different opinions due to disci-
plinary assumptions, age and expectations of what an intellectual feminist
project could be. We also noted our frustrations at the other’s normative
assumptions—and this became a key topic in this chapter. Because of the
personal impact of our different opinions encountering each other, we
also recognised the importance of acknowledging emotions in intellectual

debate.
We therefore decided to structure our dialogue around five ‘primary
emotions’: surprise, anger, fear, sadness and joy. As Turner explains,
primary emotions are states of “affective arousal” that are thought
to be inherent in human neuroanatomy (Turner, 2007). Because of
cross-cultural differences in understandings of feelings and emotional
expression, the idea of universal classifications of emotions could be ques-
tioned; nonetheless, we use these five headings as a tool to show how a
range of emotions play out in academic discourse. Under each heading
we list the primary emotion and then as subheadings the secondary
emotions, followed by our reflections related to that specific emotion and
our interpretation of how it is expressed in population debates.
Surprise
Astonishment, Amazement, Shock, Intrigue
This critique of overpopulation (...) has seemed like a settled issue in

feminist circles. Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations
resurrects overpopulation as a question for feminism. Its authors, Adele
Clarke and Donna Haraway, are two legendary, influential, and beloved
figures in feminist, cultural, and science studies. Indeed, I remember the
informal networks abuzz when they first presented this material at a confer-
ence in 2013. It was as if they had declared that they had stumbled on a
herd of unicorns! (Subramaniam, 2018)
Mila: When I began my PhD in 2018, the first text I read was the collec-
tion of essays edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway that Banu
Subramaniam refers to in the quote above. One of the things which struck
me straight away is the way Haraway and Clarke described the intense
climate of debate on population within feminism. I was aware that the
population topic is sensitive to many engaged in feminist thought (Bhatia
et al., 2020; Murphy, 2017; Sasser, 2018). Yet I was surprised to learn
that it was near impossible to discuss this issue with feminist scholars and
activists without quickly encountering open displays of feelings such as
indignation, disgust, passion and anger.
As Banu Subramanian (2018) states, before Haraway and Clarke
started working on population, the population issue seemed settled within
feminism: concern about population numbers was unacceptable. This

was the case so in part because “direct environmental impacts driven by
human numbers are nearly impossible to tease out because they are not,
and never have been, simply biological—they are the result of biological,
and political, and economic, and technological, and cultural processes
and practices” (Sasser, 2018, p. 150). As such, any attempt to reopen
the discussion was very unexpected and cause for upset. At the time,
there were feminist scholars writing on population to newly criticise those
in other fields of academia and policy making, who were expressing
concern about population growth. On encountering resistance to their
views, there appeared to be a sense of surprise or disbelief among these
scholars. Take for example this quote by Ojeda and colleagues: “What
is perhaps most surprising about neo-Malthusian environmental thinking
is that, despite trenchant critiques questioning its basic presuppositions,
it remains as strong as ever” (Ojeda et al., 2019, p. 4). The scholars
expressing this surprise are clearly so convinced by the critiques of neo-
Malthusianism that they cannot imagine a well-meaning person could
possibly disagree with such critiques. In short, in these debates we see
a widespread disciplinary agreement among feminists, to the extent that
a leading feminist such as Haraway involving herself in the population
discussion could cause much dismay and shock.
One of the most surprising discoveries I made, entering the world
of feminist debate, was the ease with which what I took for granted
as a knowable physical reality was denied by some feminists writing
about population. As someone who has been taught to appreciate the
emancipative power of statistics in, for example, public health and envi-
ronmental conservation, I was shocked to learn that there were whole
disciplines with a distrust towards numbers and what they represented.
In her book ‘Figuring the Population Bomb’, Carole R. McCann (2017)
states she “understand[s] demographic facts to be the products of popu-
lation theory, a conceptualization of biosocial reality, not a reflection of
it (p. 19)” and that “quantification involves an exercise of power that
denies it is any such thing (ibid.).” While I had read, within demography,
attempts to complicate the understanding of the practices around, for
example, census-making, I had never heard the census itself described
as depending on “a particular imaginary landscape of ‘human bodies’ in
‘virtual time’ and ‘virtual space’” (Curtis, 2002, p. 24). I still do not
know what to make of such assertions. I would prefer to live in a world
with enumeration practices and censuses rather than one without. For an
enlightening example, the work of historian William Coleman (1982) in

Death is a Social Disease, as cited by Haraway (2018), shows that early
population thinking and counting led to a better understanding of the
apparatuses of inequality and helped galvanise action on public health
in urban eighteenth century France. Similarly, I think about the effects
early Swedish census-taking had on death rates in that country. In 1749,
influenced by the Enlightenment, Sweden became the first country in
the world to establish the regular collection of vital statistics (deaths and
births) on a national level. They could thereby obtain reliable data on
mortality and causes of death, and this data was used to take key steps
in improving the health of its populace (Sundin & Willner, 2007). This
way Sweden could anticipate and avoid the human devastation of indus-
trial urban growth as seen in places like the UK (Szreter, 2003). In more
recent times, time-use studies by feminists have enumerated the disparities
between commitments to care between men and women. So, I wonder
why among feminists concerned with population there is so much distrust
towards numbers, statistics and calculations. Why are time-use studies, or
climate physics, seen as important and reliable, but demographic studies
scrutinised in order to point to forms of power and domination which
they enable?
When I studied demography in my undergraduate, much of the
teaching focused on complicating demography’s own enumeration prac-
tices. The actual number given to a country’s population was seen as a
useful best attempt to get to the truth, even if not a reliable truth. I vividly
remember a lecture about the troubles of collecting reliable census data in
a West-African country. Cultural norms about who is a “son” or a “daugh-
ter” made a survey question such as: ‘how many female and male children
do you have?’ inaccurate as people would include as their family’s sons
or daughters any young people who were important to them rather than
their birth son or daughter. Additionally, asking questions about stillbirths
or infant deaths (the answers being of key importance to a demographer)
was not possible due to the stigma that came with the death of babies in
the family. By being aware of these issues, demographers could adjust at
least partially to such anomalies, to produce statistics which can help us
understand rough population trends in those countries. However, coming
into feminist debates on population I have missed an open discussion by
scholars concerned with the biopolitics of demographic statistics on the
criteria of which numbers to trust. Which numbers should we trust and
which not? And why, I wondered, is this all so controversial?
I’ve since learned more about the biopolitical controversies around the
topic of population, particularly concerns around racism and colonialism.
Philosophical and practical questions around human numbers are fraught
with ideological differences. As Diane Coole argues, affecting fertility
rates is ‘profoundly controversial’. At stake are “liberal values of freedom,
autonomy and human rights, entangled here with contested definitions of
sexuality, gender roles and identities, family norms and embodiment, as
well as with ideological disputes over the role of the state and its powers”
(Coole, 2018, p. 4). With a topic that touches so many foundational polit-
ical and personal questions, no wonder there is so much disagreement,
especially across disciplines. The bigger question then becomes: how to
manage the conflict and resulting emotions in population debates?
Wendy: First, I admit I was surprised at your comment that there is
a knowable physical reality that is captured in demographic studies and
cannot be challenged as there is a truth to how we measure popula-
tions. My Foucauldian training in bio-politics pointed to the colonial
roots of population statistics particularly as used in wide sweeping global
population studies, which used numbers to obfuscate historical economic,
cultural and political oppression. The concerns around Malthusianism in
demographic debates continues. Betsy Hartmann’s (1995) Reproductive
Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control is still a
classic in feminist studies on reproductive justice. Her work scrutinises
the use of population numbers in discussions of environmental and inter-
generational justice. She argues that reproductive justice must be based
not on statistics but on understanding social processes and institutions
which create communities and provide the social, economic and ecolog-
ical conditions that support human security and sustainability upon which,
ultimately, all production, exchange and accumulation rest. The fight for
reproductive justice is not about how many children are born into fami-
lies and how many people are dying, but also about social, economic, civic
and environmental goals. These concerns scrutinise population studies in
struggles against patriarchy, racism, classism and extractivism. Feminists
like Hartmann, Sasser and Ojeda are deeply concerned about renewed use
of statistics in the climate debate which provide the ongoing justification
for the control of racialised bodies in population policy (Hartmann, 1998;
Ojeda et al., 2019; Sasser, 2014). I am sympathetic to their exposure of
these struggles and their call for diverse strategies to build decolonized,
socially just futures. However, I do see your concern around the othering
and silencing that goes on among feminists and environmentalists and the
quarrel around numbers in the population debates.
So, indeed, I was surprised by Haraway and her call for “making kin
not babies”. What I see as positive in the debate is that Haraway asks
feminists to consider new forms of knowledge which value kin—other-
than-human life—as part of the feminist project to unpack corporate
power, technoscience and biopolitics. The invitation is to forge a multi-
species eco-justice that breaks through gendered and racialised nature of
biology, culture and technology.
What intrigued me most was Haraway’s concept of speculative fiction
and how to engage our imaginations in thinking about how human and
other-than-human lives need to be considered as kin. I found this idea
to be unsettling. Like her Cyborg Manifesto, which we discuss below
(Haraway, 1990), Haraway provokes our feminist imaginations and our
feminist politics. Social science fiction, the art of telling stories, and
going beyond the apparent scientific givens of reproductive bodies are
appealing to me as someone trained in humanities. In reading Haraway
and eco feminists such as Val Plumwood (1993), environmental human-
ities scholars such as Deborah Bird-Rose (2013) and Indigenous writers
such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) we are challenged to see all
‘earthlings’ as kin and the need for better care for all, including being
able to mourn the losses and destruction. Acknowledging the need
to care for more than human others deeply resonates with my desire
for ‘understanding otherwise’ and decentring humans from our under-
standing of eco-justice. It seems liberating that we could consider multiple
kin as part of our battle for reproductive justice. This helped me go
beyond the human numbers game and move towards thinking about our
responsibility as humans to other beings on the planet.
Haraway is asking feminists to reimagine kinship, family, and reproduc-
tion and to talk about the politics of reproductive justice and our complex
relations to others. Reproductive justice is about sustaining the conditions
necessary for collective thriving—including environmental justice, food
justice, climate justice, antiracist social justice—and nonviolent ways of
relating to human and more than human others. Her retelling of repro-
ductive justice in the future with social science fiction stories or ‘narrative
speculative fabulation’ about future technologies that merge human and
more-than-human forms are indeed fabulous in her tentacular thinking,
(see for example the story of the Chthulucene as an alternative to the
concept of the Anthropocene, Haraway, 2016, p. 55).
Anger
Exasperation, Frustration, Resentment, Disgust,
Indignation, Annoyance
I have been screamed at after lectures by my feminist colleagues of many

years, told that I can no longer call myself a feminist (…) for arguing
in public that the weight of human numbers on a global scale, however
broken down by analysis of structured inequalities, opposition to ongoing
racist population control programs, and many other important things, is
an outrage. (Haraway, 2018, p. 87)
Mila: As someone who loves fiction, I appreciate what you say about
Haraway’s Speculative Fabulation (SF). However, in this case my main
intellectual interest remains very pragmatic; my focus is on the clashes
of opinion between academics and the emotions which population
discourses bring up. Ultimately, my PhD research led me to believe that
interpersonal and intergroup dynamics have a profound impact on the
knowledge about population which is created and put forward to, for
example, policy makers. In 2018 and 2019, I attended four different
reading groups on the Making Kin Not Population at two different
universities in the UK. I ended up coming away each time with a real-
isation that the topic of the discussion was too inflammatory to lead
to in-depth discussions. Many of the comments made related to the
emotional responses of the readers, not their thoughts, arguments or
intellectual engagement regarding population. Someone said: “This book
left me infuriated for weeks.” Someone else jokingly proposed imagining
a street fight with team Murphy (Haraway’s co-author Michelle Murphy,
who argues against the use of the word population altogether) and team
Haraway. “Yeah, we’d have t-shirts for each!” They then asked the group:
“Who are you with?” Various people emphatically said, “I am Team
Murphy.” Not one person dared to say, “I am team Haraway”, though a
few people stayed quiet. The joking didn’t last long. Reflecting on it later
I realised I felt that the general mood of the discussion was that of frus-
tration and indignation towards Haraway. While there was some interest
in the ‘Making Kin’ part of Haraway’s slogan, the content around ‘Not
Babies’ was, I would say, entirely ignored.
Before this intervention by Haraway, academic feminism as an activist
field of scholarship, had clearly settled on a certain set of norms around
population. From what I could see, students are not only trained in the
debates on population and its history, but also on what is acceptable to
say about reproduction and population. There is a sense that in feminist
circles it is not socially safe to express any doubt or concern about popu-
lation growth. Instead, related concerns are quickly moved to questions
about sustainable consumption or to problems such as eugenics and colo-
nialism that are inherent in much of the historic elements of population
control. Deviation from this norm seems to inspire anger.
I do believe that this comes from the best of intentions and a genuine
belief in the harms of populationism/neo-Malthusianism. The following
anecdote in a podcast is very telling. In ‘Imagine Otherwise’ with Cathy
Hannabach (2019) Jade Sasser—a scholar who focuses on gender, climate
justice, and reproductive politics—tells us about a frustrating teaching
experience she regularly has:
But with that said, what also happens every quarter in the classroom that is
intensely frustrating to me because I don’t know what to do about this, is
that students will hear me spend an entire hour and a half or even several
weeks offering a very critical, very nuanced, very challenging perspective
on population control. Then after all that, they’ll still go back to, ‘Well, but
we need to slow or control or end population growth because of climate
change. Population is still something that we need to really tackle because
of climate change.’ And I’m like, ‘Have you not listened to everything I’ve
been saying?’ What I’m doing in my work is, I’m really trying to disrupt
and dislodge paradigms, knowledge paradigms, and it’s hard for young
people to let those paradigms go because they’ve been raised with them.
But I continue to persevere. I won’t give up. I will continue to challenge
my students’ thinking and really try to disrupt and dislodge the idea that
population control is a natural and necessary component for environmental
conservation.
I sympathise very much with Sasser’s sense of exasperation. I learned a

lot from her thorough work in On Infertile Ground: Population Control
and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change (2018). However,
I can’t help but think that her “have you not listened to everything I
just said?” could also be spoken to her—exclaimed even—by some of
the equally nuanced and careful scholars who do warn about potential
hardship caused by growing human numbers. As far as I can see there
are very valid points made by people who call each other opponents,
enemies even (see Wendy’s point below). Are Sasser’s students not contin-
uing to press their own population concerns after hearing the critiques
because they also come across other positions, which convincingly present
the inevitable physical reality that the numbers are, at times, problem-
atic? Could that not be the same reason that those who are (informally)
identified by some feminist scholars as ‘being in the enemy camp’—
some demographers, certain environmentalists—are continuing to express
concern at growing populations, albeit in smaller numbers than in the
twentieth century?
Even just entering this debate I could find myself getting frustrated.
Not with one party or the other, but with the lack of actual content-based
dialogue across disagreement. Why is it so hard to see different types of
population knowledge as merely partial truths, as needing synthesis? To
my annoyance, I observe a lot of ignoring of the others’ arguments, on
both sides, and this seems like an utter shame. It seems to me scholars
working on reproductive rights, population and environmentalism often
find themselves in bubbles and are not listening to the nuances of those
in other areas. Or that the anger and indignation is so strong that even
when someone like Haraway is making a considered plea for dialogue, she
is met with fury by some. I want to say: ‘Just think with her! Being in
dialogue does not mean agreeing!’.
Wendy: I am sympathetic with your frustration and strong feelings
which come out when you speak of ‘utter shame’. There is anger, even
despair when we engage in debates where people do not listen. So much
anger erupts around sexual health and reproductive rights which under-
line population debates about ‘family planning’ and contraception. I have
witnessed over the years tense and loud arguments in UN meetings when
representatives of the Catholic Church and other conservative groups
would move into rooms and start disrupting discussions. I recall being
in a room of a high-level UN official as he was listening to the Vatican
Radio decrying the latest World Report on Population (which he edited)
and his disgust at what was being said, knowing he would have to face
them down in future meetings that would be deciding a country’s health
budget based on concerns around whether money would be used for
sexual health needs. During UN meetings in the 1990s, I would band
together with other feminist advocates in the different regional SRHR
movements and NGO networks order to plan strategically our inter-
ventions and speeches knowing there would be a right-wing attack to
confront from conservative and religious NGOs and governments- and
that we would have to battle for every word that touched on sexuality or
women’s right to choose.
In academe I have seen less room for anger to be expressed directly.
There is, though, often a sense of indignation that scholars can feel about
their work not being considered or heard by those other academics that
do not share their views. I have personally felt considerable indignation at
how feminist political ecology perspectives are ignored by political theo-
rists and economic scholars. To take as an example, I reviewed a recent
book by Sir Partha Dasgupta on population ethics—a branch of moral
philosophy (guided by economic and climate science) that looks at how
the numbers of people impact the quality of life of others in the future
(Harcourt, 2020). His book totally ignored feminist or gender debates,
so I was literally gritting my teeth when Dasgupta states he is “just trying
to get the numbers right … nothing more” (Dasgupta, 2019, p. xxxiii).
I felt angry at his dismissive ‘back of the envelope’ empiricism as he asks
‘birth and death’ questions which touch major concerns around gender,
reproductive decision making and natural resource use as well as a host of
other socio-ecological concerns without acknowledging the context. As
an advocate I have approached the questions of population, consumption
and environment from a critical gender, development, and human rights
perspective, engaging in transnational advocacy and policy work with
organisations such as the UNFPA and the World Health Organization.
I therefore resented Dasgupta’s lofty tone as he uses esoteric models to
tell us “how to study the population–consumption–environment nexus,
in order to tell us how far we are today from where we probably should
be” (Dasgupta, 2019, p. 218). And then, as a feminist political ecologist,
I felt indignant that he refers to deep emotional needs that ‘we’ all have
to create children and then the unbearableness of life for the half a billion
people who are malnourished and prone to disease, living in conditions
where ‘you’ wouldn’t want to create children.
His work is at completely at odds with my feminist political ecology
approach which scrutinizes the use of population in discussions of envi-
ronmental and intergenerational justice particularly around social repro-
duction as “social-environmental process required to maintain everyday
life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis
and intergenerationally” (Di Chiro, 2008, p. 281). Dasgupta’s neoclas-
sical modelling erases the entangled relationships between population
growth and environmental problems. Why, I thought while writing the
review, is population ethics determined by views such as Dasgupta’s, seen
through the prism of economic modelling about the ‘right numbers of

people’, rather than seeing how societies and therefore economies are
embedded within nature? Do numbers matter? Have we actually tried
to live sustainably – not just live differently (as in our everyday habits),
but also organise our societies differently and do politics differently, so as
to collectively address environmental degradation and inequality without
having to impose reproductive decisions?
As we discussed together, quite heatedly, numbers can manipulate and
obfuscate. At one point you asked me to look at the 2010 Ted Talk of
the Swedish academic Hans Rosling, where he uses the story of his moth-
er’s washing machine to discuss the thorny question of how to distribute
the world’s resources so people can benefit from using washing machines
without destroying the planet. The story he told, we realised, helped us
understand we were not so different in our concerns. For me the issue
was not about ‘how many people’ but about distribution and justice.
The story Rosling was telling was not about numbers, per se, but about
everyday lives, technology, gender, work and global inequities. If the
carrying capacity is 3 or 11 or 20 billion people is not the point- far more
powerful and important are the multiple and complex interrelationships
that raw numbers alone can obfuscate.
Fear
Alarm, Apprehension, Hysteria, Horror,
Panic, Nervousness, Uneasiness
I think that is part of the problem ‘we’ face. The subject is forbidden,
no matter how carefully it is framed; it has been ceded to the right and
to population professionals. To insist that seriously facing the burden of
human numbers is not racist; but shutting up out of terror of the issue
might well be. Fear of getting things badly wrong certainly doesn’t serve
reproductive justice, even in human-exceptionalist terms, much less in
terms of multi-species reproductive justice. (Haraway, 2017).
Mila: Rosling’s storytelling is wonderful, and indeed we learned through

it that you and I both cared for many of the same elements of possible
human flourishing. Yet Rosling gave that talk when population projec-
tions were far more optimistic (in my view) than they are now. I
sometimes find myself fearful, along with some demographers, that if
population in specific places continues to grow with the speed they are
now – in the context of the capitalism-driven unequal world we live in – it
will lead to further immense poverty and societal disruption.
To be specific, while I do not care about the absolute nature of aggre-
gate population numbers, I worry very much about the speed with which
some populations are growing. For me this is not about being racist but
about recognising that this rapid population growth can lead to major
problems in timely infrastructure creation, increasing global inequality
and vulnerability for many (Coole, 2018; Rougoor & van Marrewijk,
2015; UN Department of Social Affairs, 2011). And that reducing the
rate of population growth could make it easier to address existing prob-
lems. For these reasons I would say that a good analysis of the potential
impact on a particular society of (1) rapid population increases and (2) the
presence or absence of a population programme, requires both numbers
and qualitative research that address multiple and complex interrelation-
ships. The same holds for policies in this area—they need both types of
work, both lenses. In short, I do not believe numbers necessarily obfuscate
other essential considerations, even if they sometimes do.
Wide-spread provision of voluntary family planning services and educa-
tional opportunities for girls and young women are the policies which
most twenty-first century population control advocates call for. I think
you and I agree that these are important things in themselves. Where we
may differ is that I also think that it is okay to try to get more funding
for them by leveraging population concerns. And that I think it is impor-
tant that people and governments are well-informed of the concerns of
demographers and others who believe there might be trouble ahead if
birth rates in certain places are not reduced quickly—as well as of the
concerns of those who centre SRHR and oppose (aspects) of popula-
tion policy. Due to the problematic history of population and the forceful
arguments in the feminist discourse on population, concern about popu-
lation has become somewhat of a taboo in many areas (Campbell, 2007;
Coole, 2013; Singer & Kissinger, 2017). This has meant that there are
fewer academics and NGOs working on this question than there were
previously (Mora, 2014) and such knowledge may not reach the places
where it could be relevant.
On a different type of fear: I am still convinced that population debates
do not currently address the arguments in themselves but are mired
in name-calling—a typical response derived from fear (Shapiro, 2010).
Changing your opinion on important matters can be frightening. So, it is
sometimes easier to simply exclude the possibility that one is wrong and
instead push away anyone who argues to the contrary. Political ecology
teaches us to question dichotomies of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and promotes
the value of bringing together different methods, data interpretations and
opinions. I think viewing the population debate with such a lens would
go a long way in communicating more fruitfully across difference.
In the case of Haraway, dismissing her and her new ideas was diffi-
cult, because of her unique position as a well-loved feminist, a giant in
the field. Here Haraway is accused of being genocidal and anti human
but also there are attempts to—as it were—split her public persona into
different parts: A Haraway to love, one who gave us idea of the “the
God trick” (1988) and “cyborg imagery” as “a way out of the maze
of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to
ourselves” (Haraway, 1990, p. 316). And then a Haraway to ignore, a
Haraway who must somehow be mistaken, must have lost her intellectual
acumen or her revolutionary spirit.
Yet I think Haraway’s work on population is evidence of the same intel-
lectual fearlessness as she displayed by writing the Cyborg Manifesto. I
suspect she is very aware of her position in this debate, of what is and
what is not expected in terms of population opinions and what effect her
particular prominent position has on the arguments she makes. She was
always a provocateur, no? The Cyborg Manifesto is now widely loved by
feminists, but at the time, wasn’t it a very prickly set of arguments she
made?
Wendy: While I am not in agreement that the focus on population
numbers helps us deal with inequality and that population debates are
devoid of colonial and racist views and othering, I do agree that the
Cyborg Manifesto was a major intellectual intervention in feminist science
and technology studies and was in a sense fearless in its critique of eco-
feminism, and a feminist championing of science and technology studies.
She looked squarely at the fear that technologies would invade our
personal and intimate lives. In breaking through those fears, Haraway’s
Manifesto helped us to look at how technology is infused with the
political, cultural and material embodied experiences.
Mila: Wait, I may not have been clear enough up to this point. You say
you disagree with me and think that I don’t see how population debates
are colonial and filled with racist views and othering. However, I in fact
do agree that the history of population discourse and practice is linked
to colonialism and class and race-based prejudices. What I do not agree
with is that population debates – past, present and future – are neces-
sarily racist, classist, colonial and so on. For me the distinction between
‘often is/has been racist’ and ‘is not necessarily/can be not racist’ is key. I
would like to promote dialogue across disciplines and viewpoints so that,
for example, anti-racism and population concerns can come together to
promote better policy. This requires a recognition of the historic injus-
tices which have been perpetuated in the name of population. But it
also requires that population policy responds to real-life issues for many
people, including people of colour in the Global South. I would argue
that population discourse and policy frameworks can be developed within
a wider progressive politics in ways that can become a force for good.
Wendy: Your interruption is valid, particularly as you point to the need
for us to listen to each other. However, we are still not in full agreement.
For me progressive politics should be about distribution of resources,
changes in rich people’s lifestyles and openness to all women’s repro-
ductive choices, full stop, not a set of ‘population’ policies that aim to
reduce numbers because too many (poor) people cause too much envi-
ronmental damage. Diversity and context matter, and who can access
what and who is deciding who (else) is too many. I remain worried about
how this is all playing out. I fear that the likelihood of regular global
pandemics and heat waves, fires and floods due to climate change will
produce an inequitable set of policies if we do not point to racial, colo-
nial and patriarchal discourses underlying current policies and seek very
different behaviour (not just good policy). In fact, climate impacts are
already affecting the poorest countries, marginalised people, and racialised
people.
To return to cyborgs, well we are not so fearful of cyborg life as it is
now normalised. This is one reason why I see Haraway’s idea of ‘making
kin not babies’ as full of possibilities. Nevertheless, it is with a sense of
uneasiness that I take up this call to make kin not babies (or population).
As I found in Dasgupta’s text, academics and government workers who
are engaged in population policy typically do so from different angles
than Haraway’s creative way of helping us envision futures. Most demog-
raphers do not see themselves as storytelling but as empirically telling the
truth when discussing changing population trends and patterns and the
policies required to reduce population numbers to conserve the environ-
ment. Talking about social science fiction, writing manifestos, describing
personal stories are not usually acceptable academic truths to the majority
of demographers.
And at times, I admit, I do give into fear and lose hope. I am afraid
of the continued violence, not only the current escalation of wars, the
femicides, deaths of environmental defenders, journalists, but also the
dark worlds of Internet gaming etc. Such ‘naturaltechnical’ worlds are
a far cry from Haraway’s speculative fiction where human genes mix
with butterflies. How do we rethink kinning in a world dominated by
such oppression, violence and uncertain futures? What we can learn from
Haraway is that the question is not a yes or no to technology “invad-
ing” life, or a yes or no to having (more or less) kids, but what are the
surrounding ethics that we must cultivate to inform such decisions. It is
one thing to decide not to have children because I want to make kin
with my neighbours, my dog, the sea. It is another to be coerced into
not having children for the good of biodiversity. We need to give atten-
tion to the ethics and politics that informs the different debates around
population and socionatures/naturecultures.
Sadness
Disappointment, Shame, Grief, Despair, Gloom, Isolation,
Rejection, Dejection, Guilt, Regret
This is a brazenly personal paper and a plea for other-than-biogenetic

kindred. I begin with a painful mass in my gut, pressing up against my
diaphragm until it ruptures. The pain is much like the bodily feeling of
grief when my mother died, when my first husband died, when my father
died, when the dog of my heart died - the feeling of grief, exploding from
the inside out, evisceration, terror. (...) But the pain I feel in my belly
has to do with something else (...) the surplus killings of ongoingness,
the wanton surplus extinction of kinds, of whole patterns of living and
dying on earth, of genocides across human and other than human groups.
(Haraway, 2018, p. 69)
Wendy: Like fear, sadness is so much part of our lives right now. You try
to shake it off but it is difficult. Perhaps it is closer to despair as Haraway
so viscerally and powerfully expresses in the quote above. I look back over
the years and wonder at why we are in the crisis (crises) we predicted when
I was a student feminist and environmental activist over 30 years ago. Why
is it so hard to get out of systemic violence even if it is being named and
discussed all the time? Is it just because I exist in my small bubble - even
if it is a transnational bubble and one that stretches over decades full of

exciting conversations and what looked like contributions to transforma-
tive change? What is my responsibility for the failures? Individually I seem
to have benefited well enough from this deeply unfair world.
However, I continue to engage and be inspired—from the courage of
others and their stories in end times. I feel it is important to learn as
feminist academics to value ways to communicate differently, using art,
film, theatre, murals, creative spaces to allow our imagination to be posi-
tive, and see that as knowledge alongside the positivists’ ‘truths’. It is
not for me about reducing numbers, but about taking up responsibility
which is not just about providing contraceptive choices. It seems more
complex than this as I read, watch TV or doomscroll on my phone about
the increasing level of violence, war, extractivism and toxic pollution, and
recognise my awkward place in the racialised violence of modernity that
has benefited me personally at the expense of others. Even if I celebrate
some of the changes for some women’s lives and their choices, I still feel
despairing at what is not happening, from the lack of contraceptive choice
and the increase in sexual violence to the oppression against peoples who
do not conform to heterosexual norms, to the erasure of cultures and the
overwhelming loss of biodiversity and beauty in nature. I remember the
first time I heard about tipping points, now 15 years ago, from a biologist
and feminist friend. I cried then. But I couldn’t believe I would live to
see so many tipping points smash bang in our face.
My sadness extends to when I hear so many young people ques-
tioning if they should have children as they face economic uncertainty and
consider the devastating impacts of climate change in these end times.
We need to be aware of a creeping individualization of responsibility
which is capturing environmentalism. Deciding to have children when
I did was so much more about my choices. I thought I was fighting for
the individual choice to have children (the biological, technological and
economic choice). Now that ‘choice’ has become much more entangled
in social and environmental responsibilities which diminish the possibility
of the individual to speak unaware of collective responsibilities and fearful
futures.
Joy
Relief, Hope, Eagerness, Enthusiasm
What if making a baby became truly an act of joy and material, daily
responsibility for an enlarged community? How to celebrate children in
non-natalist movements? (...) How to celebrate human maturity for women
and men in building selves and communities without making babies?
(Haraway, 2018, p. 97)
Mila: I also see many of my peers choosing not to have children. Some
because of the life(style) they envision for themselves, but many also
because of fear of a climate catastrophe. And some worry about the
culpability of bringing into the world another European human who will
consume and pollute the environment 80 or 90 years ahead in time. I
asked myself about these issues when I came to the decision to try to
have children or not. At the time, the connection I felt to my partner and
my desire to create new life, a family, with him, – for me the ultimate
commitment – was a far more convincing future than the one in which
I saw my offspring as a planetary liability. I also thought back to how
my parents in the late eighties were told by their friends that they were
mad to try to bring a baby into the world; after all, the nuclear bomb
could drop any moment and bring global devastation. Their child might
only ever know great suffering. My parents, living in a squatted farm-
house, without secure jobs, still young, decided against acting on that
fear. Lucky for me! I was born, followed by my sister and brother a few
years later. And the question of my own reproduction and the risks this
would bring for my then hypothetical children came down to a simple
comparison: I am so glad to be alive, so grateful I get to be here to expe-
rience human existence with all its confusions and pleasures, that I expect
that my children might well come to feel the same. They will, however,
have to face ecological and climate breakdown and all the unprecedented
and incalculable societal changes that will come with that. Perhaps then
this is one of my primary tasks as a parent: help cultivate in my children
the ability to experience joy, no matter what the circumstances, also in the
face of suffering. For now, I am simply so very glad they are here with
me on this planet, and as far as I can tell from their endless vigour and
frequent laughter, so are they.
Wendy: Such a beautiful birth story Mila. I too can speak of joy and
hope, individually as a mother, and collectively as part of communities
who help me to find ways to relate and sustain ourselves, our kin and our
environment. For me this joy is always mediated as I continually nego-
tiate social practices of mutual support that enable strategies of living well
together. The different feminist communities, whether they have been
activist, academic or friendship based (and sometimes all three), have
enabled me to flourish and enjoy life in deeply important ways. In the last
few years, I have tentatively begun to acknowledge my joyful relation-
ship with different environments that support and sustain me. Whether
they are the oceans in Australia or the lakes in Italy or the woods in The
Netherlands or even the plants and flowers that grow on my terrace, some
that have been gifted to me by students over the years., I certainly feel
joy in these living beings. This is kinning, as their presence offers a tiny
but sustaining way to continue facing the overwhelming concerns of our
times.
Conclusion
In a political and cultural moment where debate is enacted through name-

calling, slander, falsehood, and labelling ones’ opponents as treasonous
enemies, I am deeply moved by this collection [the Making Kin Not Popu-
lation book]. Some of us will never agree, but the book reminds us of the
critical need to engage rather than disengage, and to argue respectfully
rather than blame or ignore those we disagree with. (Subramaniam, 2018)
By boldly using emotions as a way into the tricky topic of population

guided by Haraway’s invitation to ‘make kin not babies’ we have tried to
listen constructively to each other and to those with whom we did not
agree rather than draw up camps of us and them. We have had time to
build up enough trust to pause and listen to each other when we started
to note emotions rise. We had to listen hard to what the other had to say
about numbers and fearful futures. In those moments we slowed down
and chose every word carefully so we would not be misconstrued. We also
recognised as we spoke that there were taboo topics, stories that could not
be told in an academic text, as they were too sensitive or would evoke
dismissal. In other projects, where we went beyond the written word, to
theatre performance (Mila) or art (Wendy), we recognised we could allow

more to be expressed, understood and heard.
We have aimed to open up the debate on population in FPE not
only by introducing Haraway’s idea of ‘making kin’ as a feminist strategy
for survival, but also by paying attention to the emotions in which the
debate is couched. We have noted the different disagreements within
feminist circles as well as between feminist and environmentalists as well
as Haraway’s acknowledgement of the negative responses she received
from colleagues. Haraway’s descriptions of emotion in these discussions
may well have been part of her own rhetorical device to position her in
the debate, but they do foreground how much emotions shape academic
debate. Paying attention to the role of emotions in academic work adds
complexity to the debate but also can propose ways to break down taboos
and open up constructive discussion.
In our conversations, it occurred to us that the large disagreement
on the best way to consider population growth might obscure the fact
that many scholars engaged in population debates share a similar goal:
to influence policy to improve the well-being of people now and in the
future. Taking this as an explicit starting point when engaging with those
we otherwise disagree with could go a long way in allowing constructive
dialogue to develop.
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holder.
CHAPTER 11
La Mercadita 2050: Telling Tomorrows

of a Market After Oil
Lillian Sol Cueva
Introduction
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a city that does not depend on fossil-
fuels. What kind of energy will we have? Which energies will power
economic and social systems, and how do they shape our lives? Also,
picture how we mobilize through that future. Ask yourself, whose voices
were listened to in order to reach that future and what, if any, visions
were hegemonic?
When I try to answer these questions, I see two opposite scenarios
informed by my interest in energy transitions and my political engage-
ment as a feminist. On the one hand, I see a single future in which
more technologies are put in place, but not so much has changed in
terms of equality, justice, or careful relationships with humans and more-
than-humans. On the other hand, I envision a plurality of futures beyond
L. Sol Cueva (B)

International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam,
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: solcueva@iss.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_11
260 L. SOL CUEVA
exploitation; where less energy is needed, and everything is powered by

a mix of renewable and human-powered kinetic energy. In these futures,
my voice and other women’s voices are listened to, and they shape the
communities in which we live in.
Yet, while trying to answer the above questions, I realize that there
are many more imaginaries1 than my utopian or dystopian ones of how
the future will be. It makes sense to ask wider questions about the future
and to ask them to the people who have not been listened to by experts—
governments, energy industry, technicians—in order to speak in the plural
of futures and to open up the possibility of imagining and envisioning
other realities. After all, dominant and alternative imaginaries have the
potential of limiting pathways by closing down alternatives that indi-
viduals or social groups can choose from, or they have the capacity of
opening up pathways that can challenge the vision of the powerful (Birch,
2017).
In Mexico, fossil-fuels and renewables are frequently counterposed in
public debates about energy futures. These dominant imaginaries mainly
revolve around the environmental and economic implications of each.
The use of fossil-fuels is linked to nationalism and energy independence,
whereas the use of renewables is linked to the climate crisis and sustain-
able development (Elizondo et al., 2017; Malló, 2021). However, both
are focussed on top-down policy frameworks, large-scale technologies and
the centralization of energy production and distribution.
In Mexico City, policymakers have used these two imaginaries to create
a future vision of the city, where some public spaces and government-
owned buildings will be powered by renewables and others by fossil-fuels
(SEDECO, 2013). Considering that municipal public markets are offi-
cially owned by the city, they were included in such imaginaries of
1 In this chapter “Imaginaries are landscapes of collective aspirations and/or fears that
enact and are enacted by practices and commitments to certain views of the world; also,
these encode how life ought (or ought not) to be, and therefore express shared under-
standings of good and bad” (Sol Cueva, forthcoming). In this sense “imaginaries differ
from pure discourse analysis because the former usually focuses on language […] whereas
the latter emphasizes actions and performance with materialization through technology.
Imaginaries are not the same as policy agendas or frames either […], as imaginaries are less
explicit and accountable. Nor are they the same as narratives, which are usually extrapo-
lated from past events and serve explanatory or justificatory purposes. Imaginaries instead
are instrumental and futuristic, they project visions of what is good, and worth attaining
(and also, […] dystopias worth avoiding” (Sovacool, 2019, p. 174).
11 LA MERCADITA 2050: TELLING TOMORROWS OF A MARKET … 261
the future. Until 2019, it was envisioned that by 2024, municipal

public markets would be powered by solar energy (SEDECO et al.,
2019). Today, this picture has been erased, keeping markets powered by
fossil-fuels and out of the “Solar City”.2
Arguing that communities outside and beyond centres of power have
the capacity to produce and perform other imaginaries (Marquartdt &
Delina, 2019), I invited mainly women vendors to creatively and collec-
tively explore the future of four municipal public markets and their
energy systems. The activity was a storytelling-game called “Tell me a
(un)fortunate story” that used messaging apps as a medium to maintain
physical distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game consisted of
co-creating stories with 16 vendors about the future of municipal public
markets and their energy systems.3 The final versions of the stories were
sent to the vendors and discussed with them at the marketplaces.
In this chapter, I present some of the wishes, dreams and fears
vendors have while talking about the future and some of their concrete
ideas that address energy transitions. I will also elaborate on the energy
2 Ciudad Solar or ‘Solar City’ is the name that the government is using to talk about
Mexico City’s energy policy, which focuses mostly on the installation of rooftop PV in
the 2019–2024 period.
3 For more information about the storytelling activity, here I am presenting the game
instructions. The instructions were sent as an audio and summarised in a GIF:
AUDIO INSTRUCTION
You are members of a team of 4 people who will ‘Tell us a (un)fortunate story’. The
objective of the activity is to create a story collectively about the future of municipal
public markets and their energy systems. Each person will be a single element of the
story: you can be the main character or characters, the place where the story takes
place, the actions that the character performs, or their emotions and moods. I will
go from one participant to another and in each turn the participant has to add a bit
to the collective story according to her corresponding story element. In total there
will be three rounds. I will begin the story by time travelling with you. You will
continue creating the story with the help of some questions and sentences. Were
the instructions not completely clear? Don’t worry, during the activity your doubts
will be solved, however, if you still have doubts, do not hesitate to communicate
them!
The only rules are that 1) the main character or characters must stay alive and
2) you need to answer to my message with the questions and sentences that same
day or the following. I will write down the main ideas and send them to the next
participant to read what has been said. […]. (Sol Cueva, forthcoming).
262 L. SOL CUEVA
technologies imagined, as well as issues motivating energy transitions,

governance arrangements and the role of different actors in the market’s
life. However, I will not present these findings as a set of arguments and
descriptions that say, “here is what vendors said about A, B or C”. Rather,
I aim to articulate vendor’s alternative visions of the future by sharing a
story of a fictional marketplace in 2050. The story will contain some of
their concrete ideas and the implications these visions may have in their
communities and environments. As such, the story will show what markets
can be if vendors’ visions of the future come true (Leavy, 2012), making
the story “exploratory, explanatory, hopeful and generative” (Dunlop,
2001 cited in Leavy, 2012, p. 518).
First, the chapter summarizes its feminist and narrative grounds,

followed by an explanation of the particular research methods utilized
for its development. It then proceeds to tell the story of La Mercadita,
an imaginary market located in Mexico City in the year 2050. Finally,
the chapter ends with a conclusion in which I reflect and push for more
“stories for connecting (when the world is falling apart)” (Di Chiro,
2017).
The Beginning: The Grounds

Every story starts from the beginning. This specific one started in the
search for hope. Like Giovanna Di Chiro (2017), who was inspired by
Rebecca Solnit, I started working with storytelling looking for hope in the
tales, histories and stories of people. This is especially important now that
hope has become a scarce resource for many of us. Not because of lack of
enthusiasm but because wherever we look, capitalism and violence rule,
and the possibility of stopping the planet from warming with conventions
and treaties has proved disappointing (if not useless).
In storytelling with vendors, I aimed to explore the potential of stories
to enrich, deepen and communicate feminist, future and energy studies.
My hope was that developing and creating stories with people would
provide new imaginaries, visions, ideas, narratives, projects and demands.
These would enable the vendors and me to envision a plausible, alterna-
tive, non-fossil futures (Adamson, 2016); futures which centre women’s
histories and lives and tackle gender inequality and environmental injus-
tice. To explore alternative futures, my method of inquiry was feminist
standpoint theory, “which examines the experiences of women in order
to analyse how they experience and know differently from men, taking
into account the intersectionality of gendered experience in its combina-
tion with class, race, age and other forms of difference” (Harcourt, 2016,
p. 1008). At the same time, I used the notion of socio-technical imagi-
naries to investigate the landscapes of collective visions of desirable futures
that enact and are enacted by commitments to certain views of the world,
attainable through and supportive of science and technology (Jasanoff,
2021).
Focussed on creating stories with and not on Mexican women vendors,
I wanted to “challenge notions of expertise and knowledge hierarchies,
and […] to critically examine and challenge representational practices
in research and writing” (Harris, 2021, p. 9). Story and storytelling
264 L. SOL CUEVA
are particularly important for engaging underrepresented communities

in research and policies, offering the possibility of shifting the power
dynamics of knowledge creation and challenging who listens and who
speaks in academia and policy discourse (Ingram et al., 2014).
Moezzi et al. (2017) and Smith et al. (2017) highlight that storytelling
can provide data describing phenomena at a variety of levels, including
emotional and imaginative. This is particularly relevant in energy studies
because “[s]tories offer the possibility of opening up the conversation to
participation by people who may not otherwise feel competent in ‘energy
speak’, thus bringing to the fore a wider range of knowledge, insights,
and perspectives and a deepened awareness of community values, iden-
tities, relationships, cultures, and histories” (Miller et al., 2015, p. 67).
Equally, storytelling is important for feminist research since this method
“is a way to challenge dominant narratives which erase, oversimplify and
universalize women’s voices and experiences. It is an unconventional way
to explore women’s stories and to expand their possibilities as women tell
their own stories [,]in their own words” (de Nooijer & Sol Cueva, 2022,
p. 238).
By challenging notions of factuality and expertise and working to
engage others, storytelling holds the potential to connect individual
experiences to broader socio-political realities, explore place-based and
everyday practices, and foster collaboration. This is because, when story-
telling, participants share imaginations, negotiate meanings and expose
elements of the self as well as the broader economic, political and
social context. Thus, the experiences reflected in stories are never solely
about the individual, but rather about groups and communities, power
dynamics, resistances and collaboration (Harris, 2021).
While recognizing these potentials, we must also remain aware of the
limits of storytelling and stories. We need to be sensitive to the fact
that, when creating stories, people decide what is included and excluded,
inevitably silencing other voices and experiences. Therefore, stories need
to be understood as “partial truths that offer visions of and insights into
situated moments in which they were crafted and about what they were
told” (Rice et al., 2020 in de Nooijer & Sol Cueva, 2022, p. 251). Thus,
storytelling needs to be performed as an open practice in which narrative
closure is resisted.
Bringing together feminist theory and a narrative approach, this
chapter stories alternative energy imaginaries explored in the vendors’
tales of the future. This enables me to weave together heterogenous expe-

riences into collective knowledges and gives me the chance to creatively
present vendors’ “understandings of their communities, how they’ve been
treated, what is owed to them by regulators and other dominant groups,
and what their future should look like” (Ottinger, 2017, p. 43).
Methodological Disclosure
Feminist theory as well as future studies encourage the use of creative
and art-based methodologies in the process of doing research and in
presenting its results (Rose, 2013). As such, experimentation with art
and imagination has been common in feminist political ecology, environ-
mental justice and nature-society studies (Harris, 2021).
Inspired by such creativity in methods and theory, I adopted a narrative
approach and art-based methods in my Ph.D. research as well as in this
chapter. During my research, I used a narrative and feminist approach
to explore the future of energy with non-hegemonic voices in climate
change, energy and future studies. In this chapter, I also chose fictional
storytelling as a method to present such desirable futures using the power
of fiction, such as its capacity to be a vehicle for greater immersion in
what we read and what we retain after it (Leavy, 2018), to promote
empathy and collaboration (Leavy, 2012), to resist dominant narratives
and to strengthen senses of collective experience and solidarity (Hydén,
2017).
To create the story of an imaginary market called La Mercadita, I
included elements of the “Fictionalizing Process” explained by Leavy
(2018). Leavy suggests using processes of selecting, combining and using
self-disclosure to analyse different empirical and story elements, (re)write
stories in an orderly way and reveal the texts’ “real” and “fictional” nature.
First, I selected the main themes and elements of the four stories created
by the vendors that represented alternatives to the dominant energy imag-
inary in Mexico. This was done based on a previous analysis of the
four stories, our conversations after them and my observations at the
marketplaces. The themes selected were the use of renewable energy tech-
nologies in the future, for whom these would be, and how these could
be managed. Based on my analysis, I chose dialogue, negotiation and
self-organization as effective strategies for the governance of the energy
systems and markets.
266 L. SOL CUEVA
Second, I combined and reorganized the elements as if the futures

imagined in the vendors’ stories were real (Leavy, 2018). I consider this
as ‘a simulacrum’ of the world imagined, which means that instead of
presenting research results of how “reality” is, I show what it can be
(Leavy, 2012). I also made collages with drawings, photographs and illus-
trations to produce unique visualization and insights into the imagined
futures.
Third, I created characters, places and situations that reflected not just
the alternative visions imagined by the vendors but also the context in
which the stories were created, as well as my personal observations and
experiences at the markets. For example, the setting in the following story
was developed according to how vendors constructed the markets in their
stories, my observations and what has been discussed in the literature.
Fourth, I used parenthetical citations to identify which pieces of this
story are directly based on the vendors’ interviews and stories. The rest of
this story was fictionalized out of my encounters with vendors in 2018,
2019 and 2020, and my long trajectory as a customer of municipal public
markets in Mexico City, the city in which I grew up and lived for more
than 30 years. In that sense, the characters, places and problematics in
the following story “are fictionalized but are being drawn from, and are
in response to, lives and living” (Murphy et al., 2017, p. 218).
Lastly, taking into consideration that this is just one story about one
possible future, in La Mercadita, I did not pretend to describe what will
happen in “the future” or to convince you about this vision of the future.
Instead, it is expected that readers “[…] try to understand the various
developing imaginaries and help to create and disseminate new ones”
(Hajer & Versteeg, 2019, p. 132).
The Story (Fig. 11.1)

I couldn’t stop thinking. You are late again Carmen. The clouds are gray,
it is going to rain… You forgot to close the dome of the market’s milpa 4
4 Milpa is a traditional intercropping system of regional vegetables and is practised in

Mesoamerica. The word milpa comes from nahuatl, an indigenous language, and means
‘what is sown on top of the plot’. This growing system is configured around polyculture,
where crops such as maize, beans, chilli, squash and some herbs are grown together (San
Vicente Tello & Jönsson, 2019).
and your compañeras 5 need your fingerprint to close it… Some raindrops
might slash down onto the hanging pots, and the crops are not used to the
rainwater anymore. The milpa might not survive… Focus, don’t stress. You
are three minutes away.
Arriving at the market, I could see the 11 letters above the entrance,
“La Mercadita”, glowing brightly with a purplish spark. Next to it, there
were the sleek, vertical touchscreens, for self-ordering in any language,
including the 68 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico (Catálogo de
Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales; Variantes Lingüísticas de México Con
Sus Autodenominaciones y Referencias Geoestadísticas, 2018). The huge
automatic doors opened as I went in, and a cool breeze brushed across
my copper-skinned face.
Looking around, all I could see was a crowd of people shouting
and shoving. Apart from our regular visitors, there were holograms and
people with spandex suits walking through the corridors that divide and
organize the market in a nearly perfect grid (Repoll, 2010). They were
taking photos as fast as they could, interrupting the ones who were
purchasing items and bartering. The actions of these unusual visitors were
almost robotic, smiling, picking up the item, taking a photo and always
applauding after a vendor shouted “¿Qué va a llevar marchanta 6 ?”7
Walking through the main hall, I could smell papayas and oranges,
which tempted me to slow my pace. Instead, I said good morning and
rushed, returning to my mission. I crossed the communal kitchen and ran
into the shared utility room where I finally reached the controls to close
the dome.
Once the milpa was protected, I took a step backward and focussed
on the large group that was walking towards one of the stalls. It was
5 Translated to English, Compañeras means companions. In municipal public markets

the word can also be used to refer to colleagues who work at the market as well. Among
feminists the word is used to refer to those who fight alongside each other against
patriarchy and other systems of oppression. In this sense, the word can be equated to the
concept comrade. In this text, its meaning is a combination of all the above.
6 Marchanta is a word of popular use by vendors in Mexican markets used to address
the buyers. The diminutive is marchantita and male marchantito. Possibly, the French
introduced this word in Mexico, as it is similar to marchand or merchant.
7 Translated to English, the sentence means “What are you gonna buy, marchanta?”
268 L. SOL CUEVA
Fig. 11.1 Collage “La Mercadita” by Sol Cueva, 2022

a vegetable stall, in which a mestiza 8 woman like me was packing a

bunch of limes under the lamp light, asking questions about kilos and
products. I noticed a peculiar tone of voice coming from the centre
of the group. There he was, Professor Carcar Solar,9 the most famous
influencer-scholar, giving a live presentation of La Mercadita.
“Here you can see a vendor with her customer. Can you see how the
vendor is selecting limes and giving them to this woman? Yes, you guessed
right, here they don’t use food-walls, but they have products at display.
People can pay with credit cards and biometric systems, but they seem
to prefer social interaction, touching the products and smelling them,
funny right!” Carcar mentioned. “Why did you decide to keep the folk-
lore of your little stall?” he asked the vendor, and when she was about to
respond, the professor interrupted “Well, actually…” and then he ignored
my compañera, sharing his own interpretation. He did the same to the
vendor in the next stall and the next.
As one of the vendor’s representatives, I could not tolerate his attitude.
I made my way through the hologram devices and the people gathered
to ask Carcar about his presence in our space. “Oiga señor, if you are
going to talk about La Mercadita, I suggest you engage with us, the
vendors and customers. We built this space, and we keep it running every
day. We know its history, because we are part of it.” But Car, as he likes
to be called, was not interested in our story, he was just trying to sell
his tours of what he calls “the city’s food scene” (Wattenbarger, 2019).
He responded, using his instant translation device to speak in “common
people’s language”, with an explanation of how social media works and
how the experience of a woman like me was not fascinating enough for
his audience.
I was crestfallen and furious at the same time. Many questions popped
into my mind. What should I do now? How dare he treat us like this? We
are not lesser than him, and more importantly, it is our story to tell, not his.
8 Mestiza, as understood in Mexico, generally refers to a woman who has been the result
of racial and cultural mixture between Europeans, Indigenous and/or African descendants
(López-Beltrán & García Deister, 2013).
9 This character was created by me, it did not appear in the stories or the interviews.
It was thought of as a critique of some academics’ behaviour, who approach the world as
a laboratory and participants as ‘objects’ to study, and who try to capitalise on people’s
knowledge, efforts and experiences.
270 L. SOL CUEVA
I could feel myself filling with anger. I looked him straight in the
eyes and took a deep breath, remembering all the time that me and my
compañeras needed to stand up and demand better treatment and a better
market. Then, I said to the crowd, almost shouting “Just so you know
what La Mercadita is, it seems fair that I tell you our story. It is the story
of how this marketplace came to be. And it is the story of the lessons
we learned along the way. In our journey, we were not alone. We were
imagining multiple futures for our marketplaces with and for vendors…”
Just like that, I was not mad anymore. I saw the other vendors nodding
and cheering, the people in the crowd were listening. I felt powerful. So,
I continued (Fig. 11.2).
“To be honest, when we started to imagine and to make La Merca-
dita a reality, we thought it was like an oasis. It was a fertile idea in an
arid region. Dreaming of its future existence, the vision of a strength-
ened community and market, gave us relief. At the same time, it made us
believe that we were losing our minds in hallucinations.”
“In 2025, in the middle of the chaos and confusion that the COVID-
19 pandemic left behind, many vendors tried to avoid the loss of more
lives and livelihoods (Castellanos, 2021a, 2021b). Numerous markets
started to explore ways to resist what seemed to be a fatal destiny. Stalls
were closing, markets were burned down (Corona, 2021), and supermar-
kets were built on top of their ruins. Our markets were being buried, just
like the great pyramids of this territory called Mexico were buried by the
Spaniards hundreds of years ago. On top of this, we were experiencing
complete power outages. We knew this was coming when in 2021, from
one moment to the other, large parts of Mexico City went dark (‘Mexico
Suffers Another Day of Rolling Blackouts Due to Storm’, 2021). You
might imagine how stressful it was, we were not able to work for hours
until the electricity came back.
“We had already known for decades that structural renovations were
needed at the markets and that we were not able to afford them. For
years we, the vendors, absorbed the costs of small renovations here and
there, but we did not have the means nor the capacity to make major
changes (Meneses Reyes, 2011). In particular, the energy, water and sani-
tation systems were as old as the markets themselves; 70–75 years-old in
2025, and the resources to transform them were out of our reach (Liliana,
personal communication, 26 November 2020). Plus, we were not able to
decide how and for whom energy would be produced or how to deal with
Fig. 11.2 Collage “Our Story” by Sol Cueva, 2022

272 L. SOL CUEVA
droughts and floods in Mexico City, two sides of the same coin. We felt
like our hands were tied!”
“It is true that there were policies and programs in place since the
beginning of the century. We would hear politicians and entrepreneurs
saying ‘this policy will rescue urban heritage’ and ‘this project will
modernize food markets’ (Delgadillo, 2018). However, these were insuf-
ficient and inadequate to face the challenges and bring the solutions
that our communities were demanding (Giglia, 2018). There was always,
either a lack of money, or an invisible hand that favoured supermarkets
and malls instead of the municipal public markets” (Delgadillo, 2018).
Then, a hologram woman said “Yes, I remember campaigns promoting
the modernization of markets. Close to my neighbourhood, a market was
renovated. It was super cute after. We could find hip restaurants and cafés.
The only weird thing was that all the vendors were new. It was like the
renovation replaced the vendors who worked at the market before. But
La Mercadita doesn’t look like that. What did you do here?”
“Well, the first thing we did was to create a commission. It was our
goal to travel around the city to collect ideas and to learn from other
market’s experiences, like merchant’s caravans moving across continents
to find valuable goods. And so, we started the journey that same week.
It was March 2025 and we began to visit the remaining municipal public
markets in Mexico City, to learn from and with them (Fig. 11.3).”
“We travelled for almost a year.” Said Lulú, who took the floor, contin-
uing with the story. She was passing by, going from the communal kitchen
to the care centre where she would pick up her granddaughter. Lulú
was also a vendor and part of the caravan. So, I invited her to share her
experience.
“Carmen, the other vendors and I visited the markets to pay close
attention to the challenges they were facing and the ways they were
solving them. It was amazing! Some markets were moving away from
processed food and the use of electronic and digital technologies. They
went back to selling only fresh fruits, vegetables and seeds and were
using human-powered machines. Other markets were installing solar
panels, buying waste-to-energy systems, and using robotic cleaners.” She
continued, “For example, in Mercado Rosa Torres, we were welcomed
by Lucky, the robot-girl cleaner, who was about to clean the market’s
corridors, as she does every morning and night. She is powered by the
waste-to-energy system for which she collects and recycles waste (Liliana
et al., forthcoming). In Mercado San José, they were using banana peels
Fig. 11.3 Collage “The Caravan of Wonders” by Sol Cueva, 2022

274 L. SOL CUEVA
to power their information screens and biometric payment systems…

and they were even planning to use a micro-hydropower generator and
install small wind turbines (Gabriela et al., forthcoming). In Mercado San
Joaquín, they were expanding the solar panel system to all the market,
inspired by a woman butcher who turns a regular stamp-clock into a solar-
stamp-clock (Erika and Jess, forthcoming). Literally, some markets were
covering all the renewable options!” Lulú exclaimed.
Then I added “I also remember that in markets like Mercado San
Mateo Tlaltenango, vendors managed to redesign the stalls and verti-
cally expand them, in combination with the installation of individual
solar panels and rainwater harvesting systems for the entire market. They
even had a vegetable garden for the cocinas corridas 10 (Claudia et al.,
forthcoming)”.
Yes! And when we asked the vendors why they decided on all those
transformations, the response was similar in every market. Vendors didn’t
want to struggle with water or energy scarcity, nor pay high energy
prices, and they wanted to care for the environment and their liveli-
hoods. Vendors wanted to keep and recover some traditional practices
while being modern at the same time (Claudia et al., forthcoming). By
this, I mean markets wanted the newest technologies, but not at the cost
of their practices and wellbeing (Liliana et al., forthcoming), Lulú pointed
out.
“It all makes sense!” someone from the audience raised her hand and
said, “Municipal public markets wanted new paint on the walls, but they
also needed reliable services, and to keep running without turning into
supermarkets.”
“That was exactly our conclusion after visiting the markets. Well noted!
But then again, that was not all!” Lulú replied. “It was time for us to
present these ideas to all the vendors, after which we needed to come
to an agreement. It was time for us to re-shape our market and to re-
think services, products, and ways of interacting with each other and our
communities. Carmen, would you tell them about this? I must go” Lulú
said, giving me a hug. As she walked towards the care centre, she shouted
“Do not forget to visit the kitchen, I have made fresh zucchini blossoms
10 Cocina corrida is a business that sells meals of several courses at a fixed price, eaten
about 2 and 4 pm. It is called corrida (run) because it is expected that you eat this meal
in a maximum of 30–50 minutes.
in salsa verde 11 with ingredients from our milpa. I promise that you will
love them. Bye (Fig. 11.4).”
Oh, me oh my, I have to tell people about the transformations we made
here and how we did it. Not an easy task. Let me think… “Everybody, I
think that the best way to continue the story would be by showing you
what we—”
“Wait a minute sweetheart.” Carcar stepped forward and faced the
audience. “I think I can take over from here. I have very nice holo-
graphics to show the transformations.”
“No thank you, sweetheart. I can do it. Actually, I was about to give
some examples of what we have done here and explain why. Is this okay
for everyone?” and the group nodded “Great, follow me.”
I walked calmly, leading the visitors from the communal area to one of
the four main corridors. This way people could take some time to look
around the marketplace. The corridors were wide, allocating separated
stalls on either side of them (Repoll, 2010). The stalls were not grouped
according to their commercial activities and products as it was years ago
(Meneses Reyes, 2011). In La Mercadita, vegetables, fruits, repair shops,
etcetera, were scattered throughout the market.
“Here we are!” I stopped in front of my stall. It was a metal structure
of two floors, shear walls and sliding glass doors on the ground floor. A
3D printer, tools and different materials such as fabric, wood and paper
were visible through the glass doors. There was a table at the middle of
the room, and there were shelves displaying shoes, cutlery, pencils, stencils
and toys all the way to the back.12 “Ten years ago, this stall used to sell
dried seeds and mole,13 as you can see in the photo hanging next to the
door. Today it is a 3D workshop. ‘Why did Carmen change her stall?’
You might ask. Well, my compañeras and I decided to keep just one stall
with dried products in the market and to set up a workshop instead. This
11 Salsa verde is a spicy sauce made of tomatillos, onion, green chili and cilantro.
12 The idea of a communal workshop was completely imagined by me. It was inspired
by spaces such as ‘Hackerspace Rancho Electrónico’ (collective project of co-construction
of knowledge), ‘Casa Gomorra’ (collective project of dissent, bodies, pleasures and politics)
and ‘Enchúlame la Bici’ (communitarian workshop to build and repair bikes), among
others in Mexico City.
13 Mole is a traditional marinade and sauce in Mexican cuisine. Generally, mole contains
dried chilies, nuts, chocolate and spices such as black pepper, cinnamon or cumin. They
can range from bittersweet to spicy.
276 L. SOL CUEVA
Fig. 11.4 Collage “New Endeavours” by Sol Cueva, 2022

way, we would avoid competition among us and serve diverse local needs
(Brenda, personal communication, 25 November 2020). Let me show
you a pair of shoes we have been working on.”
I picked up and showed a pair of shoes with woven soles of natural
fibre, which were having a major revival after being out of fashion
for nearly 50 years. Suddenly, a written message popped-up in Car’s
holographic videocall chat asking, “Do you have other services like this?”
“Yes, at La Mercadita we have more services that share the same prin-
ciples. We have my stall which is a workshop, the kitchen, the milpa and
the care centre. The four of them serve a purpose for the market and
its community, they are led by us, and we assume mutual responsibility
towards them. For example, the kitchen is where vendors and visitors can
go to drink, eat, bake or even to socialise. It is run by the workers of
the old cocinas corridas. So, the team cooperates in collecting the ingre-
dients, cooking, and cleaning the kitchen, in coordination with the rest of
the market which also collaborates with them in clear tasks.14 Actually, if
you look over there you can see that two people are working in the milpa
right now” I pointed to the woman and man standing beneath the maize
leaves hanging from pots, carrying large hand-woven baskets. “These
vendors are harvesting chilies and squash that will be used for dishes in the
kitchen and sold at the market later (Claudia et al., forthcoming; Gabriela
et al., forthcoming). Finally, in the care centre we provide and receive self-
managed care services such as basic healthcare and childcare. I could go
on and on about the care centre, but the truth is that this project has
been set up recently. So, we are still experimenting and learning from it.
I hope I can tell you more next time you visit us. For now, I will tell
you that these services were recovered from the old markets’ designs, in
which there were stalls but also libraries, day-care centres, among others
(Delgadillo, 2016; Meneses Reyes, 2011; Repoll, 2010). Nice, right?”
And people reacted by having their watches pop up a hologram GIF of a
puppy holding a sign that said “Mind blowing” on it.
14 The idea of four communal services was mostly produced by me. It was inspired
by San Mateo’s and San José’s stories in which community tasks are presented. It was
also based on the way vendors organise market clean-up days, block parties, and planning
meetings, as well as real-world examples of collective work such as tequio in Oaxaca and
other parts of Mexico. Tequio is a form of organisation of labour in which all healthy
members of a community must participate with the same regularity in equally arduous
community activities (Zolla & Zolla Márquez, 2004).
278 L. SOL CUEVA
“Talking about experimentation, it is important to point something

out. Seeing the market today, you might think that we knew exactly what
we wanted and how to achieve it, when in reality, things were and are
not so straightforward” I added. “The processes of thinking together
and putting things in place took years of trial and error, of testing and
piloting projects (Erika, personal communication, 27 November 2020).
This did not happen from one day to the other. Little by little, market
by market, we were gathering puzzle pieces and learning how to fit
them together, in a way that made sense for our community and every
stall. I mean, we were not planning to copy-paste the ideas of other
markets. Why would we pretend to be exactly the same? For instance,
we first thought about having a marketplace full of the latest technology,
focussing just on e-commerce. But we remembered what happened
in Mercado Rosa Torres: transforming the market in that way caused
disunity between vendors, distance from the community and dissatisfied
customers. ‘Customers love to inspect their avocados before buying them’
(Liliana et al., forthcoming), I remember a vendor saying to us. So, after
long hours of presenting the technologies and projects, after discussing
their cons and pros, and making their benefits for the majority visible,
we came to an agreement (Claudia et al., forthcoming; Gabriela et al.,
forthcoming; Liliana et al., forthcoming). We decided to renovate the
market, introducing new payment methods, screens, and new appliances,
but maintaining direct contact with customers and products at display”
(Claudia et al., forthcoming; Erika & Jess, forthcoming; Gabriela et al.,
forthcoming; Liliana et al., forthcoming). Even the most sceptical vendors
agreed.
“We also considered other things that were shared by the markets we
visited. In Mercado San José, vendors told us that they were using so
many emerging technologies that the high energy demand did not fit their
energy system. Thus, they needed to install a complex hybrid renewable
energy system to meet their energy needs (Gabriela et al., forthcoming).
When we asked ourselves if we could run La Mercadita on energy tech-
nologies such as hydroelectric dams, wind turbines and similar, we said
no.”
I glanced at the audience, who were looking at me with confused
expressions. After many years of pushing states to support the goal
of 100% renewable energy technologies, what I just shared sounded
completely contradictory to them. I took a deep breath. “Please, don’t
look at me like that. Of course, we also wanted to get rid of fossil-fuels,
protect the environment, and have energy free of charge or at low cost!
But, at the same time we wondered which type of energy systems we
needed, for what and for whom. We wanted to make a decision that was
centred on us, the complete market and every stall, not just on energy
technologies. So, we gathered in vendor’s assemblies to decide what we
wanted” (Claudia et al., forthcoming; Gabriela et al., forthcoming).
“After discussing the options, in several general assemblies, we decided
that we needed a mix of small-scale renewable energy technologies. Also,
we were interested in taking advantage of architectural adjustments that
maximise the benefits of the heat and light gained from the sun moving
and the wind blowing. For example, look at the lamps above us. They
look like ordinary electric lamps, right? Well, they are not. These are
pipes of reflective materials that capture and bounce back the sunlight
(Mayhoub, 2014).”
“So, these lamps don’t use any electricity!?!?” Car exclaimed, incredu-
lous.
“Nope, they don’t. Now look in between the lamps. Do you see the
small, spinning turbine? It is a wind driven vent that continuously replaces
trapped, stale air with cleaner, cool air from outside. It does not use elec-
tricity either and it is a technology that has existed at the markets since the
last century. And…I am sure that you also saw the solar panels on our roof
when entering the market. Similarly, we installed a rainwater harvesting
system to better manage our water needs (Claudia et al., forthcoming;
Gabriela et al., forthcoming). Also, we have a micro waste-to-energy
system to manage waste and generate power. You can’t see these last
two, because they are in the closed loading and unloading area. My point
is that what we decided was “to combine modern and natural energy’
(Claudia et al., forthcoming) to meet our needs.
“Once we knew which type of energy we wanted, we agreed that
energy would be produced and controlled by us, therefore we would
not be connected to the cables on the streets (Claudia et al., forth-
coming; Erika & Jess, forthcoming; Gabriela et al., forthcoming; Liliana
et al., forthcoming). Finally, we made alliances with the government and
experts, considering that they have more money and information than us”
(Mario, personal communication, 26 November 2020).
“Aha, I knew it. You couldn’t do this by yourself. I mean, we see
how the energy industry does its best to give us energy, and they can’t
manage.” Car voiced.
280 L. SOL CUEVA
“Just like other markets, we learned that alliances were necessary to

achieve our goals. The majority didn’t want a third party to control and
produce energy and agreed that we couldn’t do everything by ourselves
with little resources. Therefore, WE achieved this, but with the support
of others. We wanted to collaborate with people and institutions that
supported our journey and who acknowledged that energy needs and
interests are only known by us, the vendors (Jess, personal communi-
cation, 27 November 2020). We did not and do not want any more
lies, empty words or random ideas. With this, I mean that there is no
room for those who want to replace the marketplaces with supermar-
kets or gourmet markets, neither is there room for alliances that want
to renew the marketplaces but displace the vendors or alliances that don’t
recognize, revalue, improve and protect our markets” (Delgadillo, 2020,
p. 10).
“So, I would kindly ask you, Carcar, to leave La Mercadita. I have
had enough of your behaviour which, sadly, inhibits OUR collective ways
to flourish.” I said while opening up my arms, as if I was wrapping the
audience and the vendors in a hug, making the “we” gesture.
“For the rest of you, please stay as long as you want. I hope you
enjoyed our story and that you will be back soon to see what other things
we are creating here, or even better, to join us in making La Mercadita
into what we have dreamt. Have a wonderful rest of the day!” I said
smiling, before heading towards the flourishing veggies under the dome.
It was time to go back to work (Fig. 11.5).
Conclusions
In an attempt to explore the future visions of municipal public markets
in Mexico City, I used storytelling, a non-traditional method in energy
research. In this chapter I wove together “other ways of doing knowl-
edge”, inviting readers to think about alternative ways of imagining
energy futures.
In order to pluralize the voices of these futures and to challenge the
“male technical” voice in energy transition conversations, my text tapped
into a range of historically underrepresented voices, centrally those of
women vendors. By using an imaginary setting, informed by the visions
of vendors, the text gave insight into the role of energy in women’s
daily activities and how changing the socio-technical energy systems might
impact their community, their day-to-day lives and the city in general. It
Fig. 11.5 Collage “To be continued…” by Sol Cueva, 2022

282 L. SOL CUEVA
showed the possible societal, technological, environmental and political

influences on the created story world.
For example, based on the stories and the conversations with vendors,
I created strong female characters who work at markets and collaborate
with other vendors to make markets better places in the future. During
the fictionalizing process, I used the characteristics of the marketplaces
and their energy systems narrated by these women vendors. Vendors
described new energy technologies and fuels, such as solar energy and
waste-to-energy technologies to face future energy challenges. Also,
vendors described governing structures in which they install and control
renewables and forums in which all vendors participate. In this sense,
storytelling facilitated complex reflections about the energy futures.
The created story demonstrates that the way people understand and
engage with energy systems is informed by the cultural and social as well
as the technical context. The chapter presents an image of what a world
without fossil-fuels would look like in a specific place and time, and how
methods such as storytelling and speculative fiction can contribute to
research.
Finally, in searching for hope, I found hopeful visions of the future.
During the storytelling activity, the vendors had the option of telling a
fortunate or unfortunate story, and all of them chose the first. This did
not mean that vendors cannot shine a spotlight on injustices and inequali-
ties, power relations and oppressions—they do—but they decided to focus
on a future without major conflicts and disruptions. What the stories
showed us is that hope can bring people together and form a basis for
collective action. Vendors imagined better futures for themselves, others
like them and for people who are willing to contribute to the flourishing
of their communities.
Hopefully, this exercise will invite others to keep exploring non-
hegemonic imaginaries in feminist political ecology and energy studies
and provide some ideas on how collectively imagining energy futures can
inform energy, future and feminist studies.
Funding: Lillian’s research was supported by the Secretaría de Energía and

the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (SENER-Conacyt) through its
post-graduate grant programme. In addition, this chapter was funded by the
Wellbeing Ecology Gender and cOmmunities Innovation Training Network
(WEGO-ITN) funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No.

764908-WEGO 2018-2021.
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holder.
CHAPTER 12
The Territory of Our Body: A Conversation

on Urban Environments in the Andes
and Their Bodies
Agustina Solera and Mariana Jesús Ortecho
Introduction
The reflections in this chapter are inspired by our concern that “knowl-
edge” needs to be rethought in order to face the current socio-
environmental risks to which Western society is exposed. In our dialogue,
we reflect on what can be learned from the Andean worldview, a Latin
American critical theoretical perspective and decolonial thinking.
A. Solera (B)
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University
Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands
e-mail: solera@iss.nl
M. J. Ortecho
Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios sobre Cultura y Sociedad (CIECS),
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) y
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), Córdoba, Argentina
e-mail: marianaortecho@artes.unc.edu.ar

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_12
290 A. SOLERA AND M. J. ORTECHO
This conversation outlines a journey that starts from the consideration

of the “urban” as a modern principle of the organisation of social space
capable of expressing profound ethical-aesthetic guidelines that collide
with South American rooted ways of inhabiting.
As we suggest throughout the chapter, other-than-modern ways of
settling community or settling community “otherwise” (Escobar, 2007),
in this case within the framework of the Andean cosmovision, are based,
fundamentally, on an understanding and sense of the relationship between
the domains of the social and the natural that is different from the cate-
gories of Western thought. The hierarchical relationship characteristic of
the Western matrix of knowledge, that reduces nature to a resource, is
irreconcilable with the Andean conception of nature and social relations,
as in this worldview no form of life can be instrumentally valued.
These marks of the Andean worldview—explored in our text through a
series of stories—constitute a cultural heritage that “teaches”, “shows” a
particular way of living that we believe provides key elements for possible
answers to our current social and environmental crisis.
Reaching this cosmovision implies that the reader is disposed to “let
oneself be taught”; that is, they possess the willingness to move away from
the relational position of domination over everything that one wants to
know that is characteristic of the modern/colonial epistemological matrix.
Thus, listening to the Andean worldview requires us to be open to
new meanings of such fundamental concepts such as “body”, “territory”,
or even “sidereal space”—since looking at a different perspective in rela-
tion to “ways of living” implies in the first place a deep ontological
reconsideration.
In the framework of Western culture, the notion of the body, for
example, is restricted to a physical and individual dimension. This concep-
tion is irreconcilable with the Andean one that understands the body as a
manifestation that exceeds the physical and material dimension and is not
restricted to the domain of the individual but is in a complex connection
with others. This consideration defines notions of “body”, “territory” and
hence any other spatial dimension as clearly different and distant from the
same terms understood within the framework of the modern/colonial
matrix.
By encountering these matters, we do not intend to expose and settle
differences between a dominant Western knowledge and an Andean-
silenced one, but to rehearse contributions coming from traditions and
12 THE TERRITORY OF OUR BODY: A CONVERSATION … 291
memories otherwise that could enrich possible answers to the needs of

our particular civilisational moment.
With our reflections, we long to contribute to a critical process of
cultural transformation and at the same time to show that the traits
that are mentioned here, either at the habitational level or a semiotic-
expressive level, come from a deep dimension that must be understood
from a perceptual plane that exceeds the possibilities of rational evocation.
The search to reformulate the idea of “knowledge” by decolo-
nial thinking, that is, to endow new meanings based on the plurality
of perspectives in the world, has emerged in recent decades from
different disciplinary trends and areas of knowledge (like Anthropology,
Psychology, Sociology, Discourse Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist
Theory, and so on), as an epistemic response to the Enlightenment-based
Western epistemology characterised by a rational, abstract, universal,
decontextualised and disembodied knowledge. This “(re)territorialization
of knowledge” has opened a fertile space for contributions to knowledge
from other-than-Western gnoseological traditions based on a long-lasting
experience—like Andean gnoseology, the subject of our chapter.
Many of the elements promoted and developed by decolonial thinking
(DT) encounter and connect to the ones promoted and developed by
feminist political ecology (FPE). At the same time, both perspectives can
be seen to converge with elements evoked from the Andean worldview.
Our reflection embraces and tries to build connections across these two
critical and politically engaged positions.
Both DT and FPE are deeply concerned with relational matrices and
problematise the relationships of domination and exploitation based on
the hierarchical classification across species, genders, ethnicities, class,
ages, abilities and others. DT, and to some extent FPE, seek to
make audible silenced voices and recognise marginalised people and
beings in the production, administration and distribution of what the
Western matrix of knowledge considers “resources”. In this process,
both approaches assert the notion of care and its relational dimension,
seeking to transcend the dichotomous conception that separates the care
of humans from the care of non-human others.
We have chosen to share our ideas under the format of a conversation,
not only to engage the reader easily, but also because of our epistemic
position. We position ourselves through our belief that knowledge is
produced through dialogue—among authors, perspectives, currents of
thought and cultural traditions over time, rather than through assertions
which are refuted in a series of rebuttals.
The format of conversation allows us to present our perspectives and
ideas in motion. We wrote the chapter on-line, over time and across
different places, writing today from Argentina and The Netherlands. In
this reencuentro, we revisit the dialogues and exchanges we have been
having since 2014, when we worked together at the National Research
Council in Argentina, enquiring into the idea of knowledge dialogues
and prompting critical reflections on the dominant ways of producing
knowledge. In this conversation we intertwine old with new stories and
experiences, to advance our critical and reflective journey.
Although our ideas converge, there are also differences due to our
personal way of expressing ideas and thinking about the dynamics we
are discussing. We celebrate the polyphony of voices as part of our epis-
temic approach and of our collective practices (such as the writing of
this chapter), trusting that our differences and singularities in dialogue
complement each other and enrich what we want to share with the reader.
Let’s Begin the Conversation…

Mariana: I would like to start this dialogue by revising the notion of
urban space, the meanings and senses associated with it, and the way in
which these are pragmatically constituted in the colonial strategy. In other
words, we know that the idea of metropolis is central to the modern
perspective, colliding with the ways of establishing community in other-
than-western cultures such as Indigenous societies.
Ideas such as order, cleanliness, efficiency, ostentation, and property are
manifested in a particular aesthetic in “urban environments”. These ideas
can conflict with practices and meanings of Indigenous settlements. This
confrontation generates a border zone (an area of cultural translation), a
liminal area that is difficult to understand in all its complexity.
From your personal and research experiences, how would you propose
to consider these situations of liminality?
Agustina: When we speak of the urbanisation of the territory, we need
to reflect on the modern strategies for territorial control that the nascent
modern state of Argentina carried out in the military campaigns which
attempted to exterminate Andean Indigenous peoples and cultures. These
strategies were formed around the establishment of urban centres in the
euphemistically called desert which the oppressors understood as needing

to be civilised by modern citizens rather than “hostile savages”.
“Shame is the repeated feeling in each of the stories”
The creation of urban centres in the South Andean territories can be

described as the modern/colonial settling of land and peoples to control
the territory. It was the project to civilise the “wild”. Not only were urban
settlements established but also National Parks were established across
the southern Andes to control territories and their resources. Using the
rhetoric of modernity and environmental preservation, the foundation of
urban spaces was a way to control Indigenous communities. The estab-
lishment of National Parks forced Indigenous communities to move to
the city to survive on a subsistence level. Yet, at the same time the urban
space, and its innermost entity, the house, was also a place of resistance
and re-existence for Indigenous communities. Since the urban public
space became the surveillance space and the place where interactions were
allowed only under a particular form, the intimacy of the home was the
fundamental place to keep Indigenous memory, language and beliefs alive.
Urbanity was the means to impose a way of life and a way of being.
Such “codes of urbanity” were tools of control and constant surveil-
lance of Indigenous people by the Argentinian state. In these imposed
modern urban spaces, a racist, disqualifying, omnipotent, moralising gaze
permeated Indigenous peoples’ lives through a permanent distinction
between ‘good’ citizens who could read the codes of urbanity and those
‘uncivilised’ people who were seen as lacking the knowledge to read the
codes.
These hundred-year-old stories continue in the present. The city of
San Martín de los Andes is one of the urban centres established in the
Southern Andes; it is an officially self-proclaimed intercultural city. Over
the last years, public debates and negotiations around the management of
the land located on the urban margins that was given back to the Indige-
nous communities gained visibility. The central question of debate was
around the level of autonomy that Indigenous territories should have.
The question was whether and how territories legally given back to the
Indigenous communities be surveyed and measured. For example, should
public streets be opened, and night lighting installed?
The question of interculturality brought with it notions of the “lack

and excess” in how people read the codes of urbanity. If a marginal area of
a town lacked public lighting, street layout and urban planning, it lacked
urbanity. And at the same time, a large part of the Indigenous community
was against those urban interventions.
Consider this: many marginal urban territories were flooded by mud,
and it was difficult to get there by car. Yet, people resisted the develop-
ment of streets. Why? I asked myself that many times when I was doing
my PhD research. One day I saw a tourist with a 4 × 4 truck speeding
across the area. I realised that the design of the settlement was not for
the Indigenous peoples, the Mapuches, but for the tourists. In communal
Indigenous territories there were no streets, people walked; there was no
street lighting, people walked with torches. Streets and lights were not for
Mapuches, but for tourists that could then use roads to visit villages. The
rhetoric of urbanity hid the control of that Indigenous peripheral space.
Urban development, based on the needs of people outside the Mapuche
community, provided the justification to intervene on those territories
and to satisfy other-than-Mapuche demands and expectations.
I spent the winter of 2015 and 2016 visiting the Mapuche Commu-
nity located in the borders of the city of San Martin de los Andes during
my PhD research. In June 2015, I was invited to the We Tripantu (a
Mapuche celebration for the beginning of a new cycle) in the Paraje
Trompul—a place located on the northern edge of the city that is part
of the territories that had been removed and recently returned to the
Mapuche community. I didn’t know how to get there. It was a very steep
one-way mountain road. I asked if people there shared their cars, but they
didn’t, they all walked. I arrived first so I waited at the school gate in the
night darkness. Suddenly, in the distance, I saw little lights appear—like
fireflies in the darkness of that cold winter dawn. They were the flashlights
of the people walking together to the school.
Walking to school was a moment for conversation and encounter.
Teachers, as they walked, shared what they planned to teach. This shared
walking did not mean a lack of car as I had assumed. By crossing the city,
climbing mountains, chatting, listening, sensing the territories together
with others, humans and other-than-humans, they were welcoming and
enjoying being in relation otherwise.
During the winter of 2016, different women from the Community
shared with me stories about their lives, their childhoods, and the lives
of their elders inside the Mapuche Community. One of them told me
that when she was young, she used to walk from the urban margins
where she lived to the centre of the city where she went to school. Every
morning she walked down the mountain with her sister and her father.
They often arrived class late with mud on their white school pinafores or
guardapolvos.1 Her sister used to run away from school feeling ashamed
to enter the classroom with her white pinafore covered in mud. But my
interlocutor, in contrast to her sister, proudly displayed the visible stains
to her classmates, saying how exciting it was to live in the community.
Another woman, a Mapuche teacher, told me that one rainy day, after
washing her white school pinafore, she dried it in the wood-burning
kitchen. The day after, inside the classroom a student, covering up his
nose and making obvious gestures of disgust said: ‘It smells like Mapuche
in here!’ referring to the smell of smoke.
In Argentina the white school pinafore holds a series of specific mean-
ings: the homogenization of citizenship, the erasure of social and cultural
differences and the identification with a civilised (white) westernised
citizen. It is a symbol of national union and equality, modesty, hygiene
and neatness. Due to its homogenising, standardising and disciplining
character it has been the emblem of codes of urbanity in school settings.
What is the meaning of my interlocutor pointing to her white school
pinafore stained with mud? What is the meaning of leaving a white
pinafore stained not clean but smoky, instead of ironed, perfumed and
starched?
These daily life stories point to liminality or “thin cracks” through
which the cultural heritage of an other-than-Western way of being in
relation sneaks in. They are as fine as the cracks through which light
filters, preventing blackness, preventing complete erasure. Even when
codes of urbanity prevail, in the most intimate space, in everyday life prac-
tices, those powerful remnants of other ways of being in relation, persist.
There may be minimal, subtle, silent fragments that most of the time go
unnoticed. Yet, for that very reason, they survive.
1 The white school pinafore, guardapolvo blanco in Spanish, is the uniform used in
the public primary schools in Argentina. Inspired by hygienist precepts, the white school
pinafore looks like the knee-length overcoat worn by professionals in the medical field.
It is mandatory, worn by teachers (mostly women) and students. It has been more than
100 years since the state recommended its use, considering it both a democratising and
disciplining element, for social inclusion and for educational organisation and control. It
is, to this day, a symbol par excellence of free public education in Argentina.
The stories I heard in the Mapuche Community speak of lack or excess

in relation to the norm. Loud music, grotesque laughter, those who speak
loudly, don’t work hard, those who walk rather than drive cars, those who
are always muddy and dirty. These situations of liminality are transgres-
sive. They are gestures that break away and defy what the rules of urbanity
dictate. They reveal the persistence of another way of being in relation. If
the mud is life, where the strength of the ancestors dwells, then to connect
with the mud is to interact with forces beyond modern-Western under-
standing of life, death, space and time. Walking can mean the misfortune
of lacking a car, but it can also mean the desire and the opportunity to
relate with people and nature, with being in territory otherwise.
Mariana: It is beautiful what you say, subtle and powerful. It seems
that there has been a set of representations—strongly supported by visual
images—which coalesce in what is seen as an “Argentine identity”. The
wearing of a white school pinafore is linked to what is the right colour
skin; the enforcement of short hair (in the case of men) and long combed
hair (for women); a certain “moderation” in the forms, gestures and the
way of speaking. Such aesthetic attributes are part of modern ethical
values of control, discipline, work and effort… indispensable require-
ments to be and appear “Argentine”; to be people worthy of settling
into national territory, of considering themselves owners of these lands
and deploying their power.
Now, it is curious that national territory, particularly that of Southern
Argentina, belongs—to a great extent—to foreign owners.2 Argentine
citizens have found it difficult to problematize the colonial erasure of
the presence, legitimacy and territorial rights of communities pre-existing
the conquest. Indeed, it is only in recent decades that Argentinians have
become aware of such denials. But the situation is even more complex
in the present since the information regarding who is owning Argenti-
na’s resources is now openly debated in the media. Along with the
concern about economic dependency on international organisations is
the growing awareness that the Argentinian territories themselves are
owned—by law—by billionaires from the global North, who are icons
of wealth and exploitation of people and resources.
2 According to the National Registry of Rural Lands (RNTR) 5.57% of the rural Argen-
tine territory, that is 16.253.279 hectares, is in the hands of foreigners (half of the surface
of Italy). Moreover, 40% of the Argentine territory (around 65 million hectares) is in 1200
landowners’ hands (INFOJUS, 2015).
How do you understand these growing concerns around ownership

and exploitation of territories? Is there a need for collective questioning
of the concept of tenure and property?
Agustina: To continue with your representations of what makes the
Argentine citizen, I would like to add that all of those representa-
tions are supported by public laws and policies. For example, the laws
that promoted “education on Argentine heritage”: these laws banned
Indigenous languages in schools and imposed Spanish as the only
language of instruction. The only history taught was one of national
heroes, through celebrations and hymns, idealising one specific citi-
zenship: that of the white, Western(ised), urban man (not even white
Westernised woman).
These colonial strategies gave legitimacy to the submission and exclu-
sion of difference, even if their attempts were not entirely successful. The
imposition of one language, one flag, one official history, one religion,
expressed the control of difference and installed (in law and custom) a
model of society based on domination—what the Peruvian sociologist
Anibal Quijano has named coloniality (Quijano, 1992).
The legitimacy of the subjugation of difference led to the public denial,
the rejection and the shame of being Indigenous, and therefore, of not
“being worthy” of establishing an urban community of citizens. Although
many privately resisted this subjugation, shame is the feeling that is
repeated in each of the stories I heard. The shame is not something of the
past, it is also experienced by the people of my generation who, during
childhood, learned from their parents to hide, deny and to be ashamed
of their Indigenous identity, language, memory and beliefs. The current
processes of Indigenous re-identification and “dignification” (as people
name it within the community) of being Mapuche, is linked, precisely,
with the rejection of shame. I point to this to understand why it has been
difficult to problematize the question of the presence, the legitimacy and
the territorial rights of the communities that pre-existed conquest of the
land. In recent decades, with the recognition by the State of the pre-
existence of Indigenous communities to modern state, silenced stories are
emerging which reveal that the community life in these peripheral terri-
tories existed before the white Western settlers who, with extraordinary
effort and sacrifice, settled, populated and civilised those hostile lands as
official history stated.
Within historical and geopolitical processes of colonial domination and
independence in Latin America, the South Andean region is a periphery
in relation to urban centres of power. The South Andean territories were

geographically disconnected from the urban centres founded along the
Royal Road (or Camino Real in Spanish) of the colonial period, the
road that during the colonial period linked the Port of Buenos Aires with
the Alto Peru. These territories entered modernity as an empty space on
which to expand productive frontiers; a land rich in resources that had
been wasted, land favourable for development, a space without a past
and with full possibilities for the future. The systematic policy of trans-
ferring public land to private hands through donation, sale or reward
for services rendered to the Nation (such as the financing of military
campaigns) produced large concentrations of land in few hands, not only
foreign but also local. The complicity between local elites and interna-
tional interests consolidated colonial relations after independence. Once
again, an illustration of what Quijano called coloniality.
We have now an opportunity to question collectively the ideas of
possession and property. It is a far-reaching debate. It is important
to question the notion of individual property and recover the idea of
community property. It seems to me that the first step would be to rethink
the collective, and from there, open the way to debate ownership. Since
the appropriation of these territories by the national states, the land has
been classified by its use and by who owns it. The notion of ownership
is so strong that even the Indigenous communities that have effectively
managed to legally return to their ancestral territories are considered
owners. But for Indigenous people, land is not a property. However, to
receive territorial restitution they had to accept the idea of ownership.
Through this process, they managed to add a new figure to the constitu-
tion: Communal property. The figure of “Community property” was the
way Indigenous communities were able to meet the requirements, within
the limits of the modern state and with its legal tools (within modernity,
but on its margins).
It is important to review our history and rethink our future. In
this Southern Andean space/time, a series of highly conflictive situa-
tions converge. On the one hand, we can no longer continue ignoring,
postponing, or denying the existence of Indigenous peoples and their pre-
existence in these territories—according to the Constitution, they are the
legitimate owners. On the other hand, we cannot ignore that the access to
these lands and their resources have been handed over3 to foreign million-
aires and multinational corporations who legally own them. Although we
cannot undo this completely, we can stop its advance. Local movements
that have spent decades of continual struggles have reached national and
international visibility.4 This moment of profound civilizational crisis is an
opportunity to reflect on the process and undo the restraining of other
ways of seeing territory.
Mariana: These are situations of translation; that is to say, instances
in which to be able to understand or to establish a dialogue, something
must be “lost”, in meaning or sense.
On the one hand, these processes—which go far beyond the mere
issues of language—sink into cultural distances that integrate different
ways of feeling and thinking. If Indigenous communities constantly
renounce their own meaning making and senses (their deepest ways of
inhabiting the world) it is worth asking ourselves what we are losing or
are willing to lose, from the Western senses, in pursuit of an effective
intercultural encounter. I am referring to how we transcend the meanings
behind the control of people, land and body at the institutional level,
which appear in the different areas of state administration. I understand
3 The plundering, handover and “foreign takeover” (extranjerización) of lands has been
going on for more than a century in Argentina, as have the claims and struggles of indige-
nous peoples to recover them. From 1880, the Argentinian State applied a “systematic
policy of transferring public lands to private hands through the donation, sale or reward
for services to the Nation [the killing of indigenous populations]” (Bandieri, 2005).
Donations were established by law to encourage colonisation (Minieri, 2006). After the
indigenous erasure at the end of the nineteenth century, the lands taken were ceded to
investors, giving rise to the large livestock companies of foreign capital. This process took
place within the framework of legal disorder that protected speculation and hoarding in
the hands of foreign actors (Vazquez & Sili, 2017). The English company “The Argentine
Southern Land Co.” (renamed Compañía de Tierras del Sud Argentino at the time of the
Malvinas war), for example, received almost a million hectares in Patagonia as a gift from
the nation. By the end of the twentieth century, a new cycle of acquisitions by external
investors was consolidated. The most emblematic example is the Benetton group that
acquired the Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino, accumulating 900,000 hectares (Forty
times to the City of Buenos Aires.) (Minieri, 2006, pp. 7–9).
4 In recent decades, denunciation of land foreignization has achieved national and inter-
national visibility and circulates in social discursivity. An example of this is the public
support in 2004 of Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1980, to the Mapuche people in their struggle to recover their ancestral lands, who stated
that “If we don’t stop this intrusion we will live in exile in our own land” (Macarenhas,
21 August 2006).
that this is a key question for those within social studies and humanities
who are committed to diversity.
On the other hand, the distance between cultures does not come just
from different meanings and senses but fundamentally from the way they
are produced; something that goes far beyond language; but what we
know as forms of “representation” of culture and meaning are the last
thing the West would be willing to leave behind.
In academic fields, but also in the general social arena, the dominant
representational modality is the verbal one, with all the semantic restric-
tions that this implies. It is enough to remember that scientific texts—
rationally used, unlike in the field of arts, such as poetry or literature—are
defined through a limited and limiting series of logical articulations. The
format of academic texts requires a way of structuring that constrains the
emergence of other (what are perceived as non-rational) senses. Indeed,
those who decide to break these semiotic patterns of construction place
themselves outside scientific knowledge, appearing as art or in a diverse
cultural framework, with all the institutional exclusion that this implies.
The Andean cultural horizon is simply not comprehensible by Western
rationality. It cannot be covered from the logical and linear linguistic sign
because the deep matrices of its senses are different, strongly marked by
the notion of circularity. It is a founding pattern that appears both in its
landscapes and in the way verbal discourse is displayed. It is manifested in
its iconography (which entirely seals the mountain range by petroglyphs),
ceramics and the idea of inhabiting itself, which, from a Western perspec-
tive, would be linked to architecture, urban planning and conservation.
Only through ethical and aesthetical assessments of multiple materialities
would it be possible to take a glance at Andean epistemology from these
otherwise forms of representation (pictorial, sculptural and architectural).
Given this, how do you understand the different ways of inhabiting,
between the Indigenous cultures of South Andes and the Western cultural
matrix?
Agustina: You ask what we are willing to lose from the Western knowl-
edge to allow a true intercultural encounter. Your question inspires me to
ask a further question—how much more will we lose if we do not consider
other perspectives? The Mapuche poet Liliana Ancalao (2018), wrote:
I’m talking about an ancient language and the ignorance of men who
mapped a country over a territory full of names, elements, and meanings,
silencing it. I’m talking about what we lost. All of us.
All of us who were born without knowing the names of every plant,
every stone, and every bird of this land.
I woke up in the middle of a lake. In gasps I tried to give thanks but
didn’t know the words.
I resonate with what Ancalao raises about the plurality that has been
deprived to “all of us”—the knowledge that all of us lost. What would
we all gain with an effective intercultural encounter?
Looking at the different ways of inhabiting helps us to reflect on what
you expressed about the distance between cultures as a consequence of
the way of producing meanings and senses; and not as a result of the
different meanings and senses themselves. Under a broad conception,
inhabiting the world, as a practice, is a continuous process anchored to
a body, a territory and a specific social and historical context. Inhabiting
the world is a collective process embedded in a network of relationships
woven through time and marked by a particular way of relating. In this
sense, based on my own journey, I understand that the deep network
of relationships between the territorial, the ancestral, the spiritual and
the communal, is central to understanding the inhabiting of the South
Andean Indigenous cultures.
Following up on your comment around circularity as a relational
matrix, I can add that the gap between the different ways of being in
the world—in this case between South Andean Indigenous culture and
Western culture—reflects the conflicting distance between the founding
elements of their relational matrices.
Without intending to essentialize, and without ignoring the complex-
ities and heterogeneities within them, it is understood that the Andean
relational matrix is based on a life-affirming relationship that is sustained
in the care of all beings and the care for the reproduction of life. Contrary,
and given its colonial origin, the relationship of domination and control
of nature and people for exploitation and consumption are constitutive of
the modern Western relational matrix. This last clearly does not represent
all of Western culture. There are deep life-affirming Western struggles that
question and manifest against this relational mode.
The Andean relational matrix sustained in care is based on the concep-
tion of equality between the various forms of life and therefore on the
intrinsic right of the different forms of life to regenerate themselves. In
contrast, the most predominant relational matrix of the West, sustained
in domination, is based on the conception of hierarchies between humans
(since the invention of the idea of race), and between humans and nature.
The Andean world view is based on a circular perspective in which
human beings are part of the weave, while the Western is grounded in a
linear hierarchical perspective in which “The Man” (male, Western, urban,
white, heterosexual, able bodied) takes the highest place.
Care for life and its reproduction contrasts with violence produced
by domination and exploitation—founding characteristics of a relational
matrix that since the emergence of the Enlightenment and coloniality
dominated the world. This implies moving from the centre the care for
the human and for the individual, to bring instead the care for the capacity
reproduction of the complete weave of life. Care for the plurality of life
seeks to protect the complete weave of life. Ontologically, each being in
this weave occupies a vital place for continuity. Therefore, to protect life is
to make room, to keep a safe space for each being to develop its life course
and to regenerate. Circularity, from the Andean perspective, is going
back to the origin. This stands in contrast to the Western Enlightenment
conception of unlimited growth in pursuit of progress and (economic
and political) development, in which the direction is linear, away from
the origins. Posing the idea of returning to the origin helps us to under-
stand how growth can come from the cultivation of life. Learning from
the experience of the South Andean cultural horizon invites us to make
room for the plurality of worlds and to rethink modern/colonial Western
practices. This implies positioning the West as a place of reception, letting
be rather than doing, becoming affected and therefore becoming vulner-
able, letting vital processes take their course as decolonial and feminist
political ecology approaches invite us to do.
Mariana: Isn’t it remarkable the way in which these considerations
have reappeared, although we are not sure precisely how or where from,
and have now begun to circulate in general social discourse? Discussions
on (the promotion of) interculturality seem to have generated the possi-
bilities of emergence of this kind of engaged understanding with the
otherwise to the West. I would caution us here, there is a trap. The notion
of “worldview” has served to position non-Western cultural heritages such
as the Andean worldview in a space of distant gnoseological recognition,
which means it cannot question the legitimacy of dominant Western insti-
tutions, governed by their epistemological rules, even those which are
critical.
For instance, each of the axiological, ontological and semiotic concerns

you raise necessarily become an epistemic model—a dynamic of knowl-
edge that starts from a way of perceiving which appears completely
unknown.
Take the question of naming the “natural world”: from the Western
epistemological matrix of knowledge and its way of representing, plants
are only considered in their ornamental dimension or in their instru-
mental possibilities. Biology, for example, has made—and continues to
make—enormous efforts to classify minutely the South American flora to
find its medicinal properties. Thus, each of the “discovered” varieties are
observed and categorised according to these specific kinds of qualities:
emmenagogues, healing, anti-fever, etc.
It is difficult to find a clearer example of the instrumental perception of
the world, so lucidly denounced by critical philosophy since the late twen-
tieth century. However, this pattern of knowledge remains completely
intact in a field that is as important as medicine and related disciplines,
such as biology or physics.
From the Andean worldview, this cognitive operation and way of
approaching the natural world, implies nothing more and nothing less
than losing the opportunity to encounter the different processes and
experiences that each plant displays, of which those related to the physical,
biochemical dimension, are just a small part.
It is important to be clear that cultural difference in the way of
perceiving and understanding the world of “nature” is perfectly valid from
the different perspectives through which the body is understood. But
what is important to underline is that in an Andean perspective, the body
(one’s own and others) is nothing more than a point in that knowing
weave.
So, the difference can seem immeasurable, impossible to overcome; but
this key epistemological feature of Andean culture—the circular knowing
weave—is not given its epistemic status by the West but is referred to as
part of an almost picturesque and distant “worldview”.
It is also intriguing how the body—that great unknown—has been
returning in different ways to the scene of social theory, demanding its
denied place. Anthropology of the body and emotions has risen as a
subject of study in Performance Studies in dialogue with feminist theories.
How do you consider the place that the body has reached today in
social studies and what elements do you think it is possible to contribute
from the Andean cultural horizon?
Agustina: Your thoughts about plants recall for me a question: what is

the purpose of building bridges across the plurality of knowledges? What
is the purpose of the knowledge that we produce by encountering others?
I continually return to these questions, trying to be cautious with the
knowledge that others shared with me and with what I do with it from
my privileged position in the academy.
As a decolonial researcher, I orient my academic efforts towards
encountering perspectives otherwise to learn from them. However, this
learning is not aimed at recovering specific knowledge about something
in order to possess it or obtain something from it. Instead, I aim to learn
about other ways of being in relation.
Mapuche women use plants for healing purposes, but they also relate to
them in a very particular way. Before taking a plant from the ground, they
ask permission to use it and benefit from its properties. Both the ritual of
asking for permission, of expressing in words the reasons why the action
is carried out, and the ritual of thanking the plant for providing its prop-
erties, have to do with the relational matrix between women and healing
plants. The ritual accounts for the consideration of plants as entities, as
a living part of the weave of life with rights to be and reproduce them-
selves. As Quijano says “it is not accidental that knowledge was considered
then in the same way as property — as a relation between one individual
and something else” (Quijano, 2007, p. 173). In this ritual example, the
idea of the subject of knowledge and object of knowledge (and therefore
objects of domination and exploitation) are diluted. The plants become
subjects and the relationship is one of cooperation between subjects.
But, returning to your question, I understand that the body, like
the territory, plays a preponderant role in knowledge production. When
understanding the notion of inhabiting the world, as a process sustained
in a historical, cultural, social and political weave that shapes and trans-
forms it; the notions of body and territory become central to the deep
intertwined meanings inscribed in dwelling. Knowledge is always situated
in a territory and in a particular body that produces it. By accounting
for the geopolitical and body-political location of the subject who speaks,
we recover the partiality of perspective and in so doing can question the
universality of knowledge. The situated character of knowledge (Castro-
Gómez, 2005; Haraway, 1988) and the focus on the violence of Western
domination inflicted on other than heterosexual, white, male bodies are
the main points of convergence between feminism and the decolonial
perspective.
From the Andean cultural horizon, it is possible to problematize the

ownership of the body and reflect that, like the territory, the body is not
a property. And, in the logics of coloniality, like the territories, racialized
bodies have been property.
The Andean horizon shows us another way of understanding the body
and territory, both part of a common weave. Andean cosmology teaches
us to see that it is not possible to separate the body/territory from the
spirit, and that each living being (body/spirit) has a place and fulfils a
vital function in the weave of life. The Andean cultural horizon teaches
us about our responsibility for care so that life can continue its regener-
ative process. From this perspective, care for the bodies/territories has a
collective nature—it is caring for the indivisible weave of life.
Mariana: The expression you use regarding the Andean cultural
horizon is very interesting: when you say that it “teaches us”, it reflects
it’s the idea’s deepest sense on two levels: on one hand, it disobeys that
dangerous idea, inherited from early Anthropology, which postulates that
it is possible to know other cultural frameworks without questioning our
own semiotic and cognitive habits. This early anthropological assump-
tion has been strongly problematized from the decolonial perspective
(Segato, 2018). But on the other hand, the idea of “letting ourselves
be taught by other cultures” places science in a completely different posi-
tion. It is no more about a science that “knows” and goes in search of
its multiple “objects” or “subjects” of study to consequently “teach” the
rest of society; on the contrary, it begins from an intentionally receptive
position—less masculine and less imposing—to put Western science on an
equal footing, from a dialogical position, with respect to what it is trying
to address.
“to hold differences, be taught”
As such, this move constitutes an important feature of the decolonial

movement as different from other theories which are critical of modernity;
it aims to recover the cultural heritages silenced by the colonial enterprise.
Further, this emancipatory decolonial movement is not restricted to
scientific production. The issue of care that you mentioned before is inti-
mately related to the concepts of reciprocity and cooperation, which go
completely against the grain of the current social scientific dynamics that
are open only to a certain type of production of logical argumentation.
Research “products” (papers, thesis reports, books, etc.) are not mate-
rials or media designed to communicate with diverse cultural groups.
Quite the contrary, these pieces strengthen intra-institutional communi-
cation, fuelled by information that comes from ‘international’ knowledge,
perpetuating the extractive-academic-logic.
How do you understand decolonial research as an opportunity to
“let oneself be taught” when the deep structures, the hierarchical
dynamics—semiotic and socio-cultural—that we intend to transform by
the decolonial move have not yet been modified?
Agustina: The desire to “let ourselves be taught” is profoundly
valuable, although still unattainable. Bridging the distance that exists
between those desires and the possibilities of learning from other rela-
tional matrices is where we are lacking. Reducing the expectations of what
Western epistemology can do would be the first step in this direction.
The profound ancestral wisdom that inhabits the Andean cultural
horizon is there. Yet, the very idea of “ancestral wisdom” refers to an
almost mystical idea that the West find captivating and attractive, but
continues to decontextualize, simplify and abstract from its epistemic
status, through the notion of “worldview”, as you explain above. Moving
towards an encounter with the deep and unintelligible processes that the
southern Andean ancestral wisdom holds means establishing a dialogue,
which is not easy.
“Research outputs” are specific products resulting from research
processes. Even in the research carried out by those positioned on
the margins of modern Western epistemology, investigative “products”
continue to be reductions, abstractions, translations into an academic
language, of an entire universe that has been opened and shared to us.
When translating lived experiences, we reduce all that richness to what
(from our own perspective) we can understand. All the abundance that
comes from other processes, all that immensity that exceeds the scope of
our understanding frameworks, becomes negligible or unintelligible, or
“in-significant” as Zulma Palermo (2004) describes it.
The desire to build bridges with other ways of being and relating
pursues a profoundly valuable goal: epistemic, social and environmental
justice. However, in the movement towards understanding, interpreting,
and translating those interpretations to a specific language, all that shared
richness is reduced and simplified. This universe of meanings alludes to
something much deeper than we (the Western-based scholar) think we
encompass. Can we understand from our Western interpretative matrix
the deep relational processes that unfold in the ritual of asking permis-
sion and thanking the plants before extracting their medicine from them?
Even if we cannot fully understand it, we should not reject the invitation
to let ourselves be taught.
These reflections seek to contribute to bridging those gaps between
diverse cosmologies. My encounter with others made possible my aware-
ness of coloniality. My encounter with other perspectives, in specific
territories and with specific bodies that have suffered (and continue
to suffer) in their own flesh the colonial wounds, has opened up the
possibility of becoming aware of processes that were foreign to my
Western experience; to unveil previously naturalised situations. Encoun-
tering others transforms one’s perspective. After knowing the experiences
marked by coloniality it is not possible to be indifferent to it.
Even when the deep structures have not been modified, the invita-
tion to let oneself “be taught”, and to then return to academia to reflect
epistemologically on what has been learned together with those bodies
that have been traversed by coloniality, has transformative potential. This
practice is within the framework of our possibilities and contributes to
the emergence of the plurality of the world. The path we move on is that
of the fight against oblivion, based on the recovery and reconstitution of
the memory that inhabits plural bodies and territories. We could move
forward by making a turn, from an active position to a passive one, by
listening, by letting oneself be permeated by the experiences of others.
The challenge would then be to lean on the memories and stories that
others share with us, nourish ourselves with them, and work hard to keep
them active, alive; against the destruction of the plural heritage and the
extraction of life at all levels, human and other-than-humans.
Among our effective possibilities of generating transformations is that
of enriching a critical movement that contributes to the struggle so that
others can take part. This does not end simply in criticism. The crit-
ical review would be a reflection on ourselves. We would go to meet
others, but this time not to understand what those others think and
establish intercultural and inter-gnoseological dialogues with them (some-
thing that seems ambitious and unrealizable), but to revisit what we think
of our own trajectories once we articulate with others. And that would
require expanding our reception and listening capacity. The invitation to
let oneself “be taught” is the invitation to become available, permeable,
sensitive—to make room to host differences.
A Few Closing Words Until We Meet Again…

Throughout this conversation we have exchanged considerations around
some of the most challenging questions of our time—starting from
the consideration of the “urban” in the Andean-colonial encounter, we
moved into the question of knowledge in its different manifestations and
ended with the need to rethink and listen otherwise.
Listening to the Andean perspective, which is not homogeneous but
singular and characteristic of an entire “space-culture”, we have tried to
think with the readers about questions related to the different ways of
inhabiting territory, understood from a broad and circular conception, as
an extension of our own body.
The Andean perspective understands the individual and collective
are part of the general body of nature within a circular matrix. This
matrix associates the body with abstract and symbolic, mental or cultural
processes through a bond of mutual affection.
We think that the investigation and understanding of these issues is
currently emerging as particularly challenging, configuring a space of
knowledge that is given voice in different spaces of research and disci-
pline such as Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies or Decolonial Studies at
times overlapping with FPE, by bringing centrality to the (collective or
individual) body and sensory, by calling attention to care for humans and
other-than-humans, and fundamentally, by striving towards being, doing
and knowing otherwise. In this sense, this space of knowledge is open to
knowing and wisdom coming from non-Western spaces, such as Andean
Indigenous cultures, that as we have tried to show through this conver-
sation, have essential contributions to this moment of re-founding a new
way of understanding life.
References
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de la tierra pública en la Patagonia. Mundo Agrario, 6(11). https://www.red
alyc.org/articulo.oa?id=84501101
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holder.
Index
A C
academia, 4, 25, 53, 57, 159, 160, capitalism, 6, 10, 14, 20, 23, 24, 53,
168, 170, 171, 237, 264, 307 82, 86, 161, 193, 197, 198, 263
activism, 4–6, 9, 12, 20, 22, 23, 25, caring communities, 178, 181, 183,
35, 53, 55, 57, 66, 76, 77, 80, 191, 193, 197, 199, 200
90, 91, 96, 171, 173, 187, 191,
climate, 1, 10, 14, 19, 20, 23–26, 28,
197, 208, 216, 235
30, 31, 33, 36, 38, 39, 46, 47,
aesthetics, 52, 142, 292, 296 63, 107, 119, 158, 161, 162,
ageing, 2, 12, 105–123, 196 164, 167, 179, 183, 186, 189,
agriculture, 78, 141, 162, 183, 189 192, 193, 197, 198, 215, 232,
Andean worldview, 11, 289–291, 302, 235, 236, 238, 239, 244, 248,
303 250, 251, 260, 265
art activism, 53 climate justice, 23, 25, 26, 31, 122,
178, 182, 191, 240, 242
collaboration, 53–55, 57, 157, 170,
184, 185, 193, 264, 265
B coloniality, 6, 7, 10, 11, 23–26, 28,
biopolitics, 76, 92, 97, 238, 240 29, 31, 35, 38, 43, 46, 52, 57,
70, 180, 207–211, 218, 224,
body, 3, 6, 9, 11, 65, 76, 79–81, 83,
297, 298, 302, 305, 307
85, 90–92, 96, 111, 171, 185,
197–199, 208–211, 216, commoning, 5, 7, 181, 185, 191, 201
218–220, 226, 235, 290, 299, commons, 9, 10, 24, 25, 27, 36, 78,
301, 303–305, 308 79, 87, 94, 106, 109, 114, 119,
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023 311

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4
312 INDEX
136, 163, 180, 183, 185, 191, 93, 98, 109, 111, 115, 119–121,
192, 209, 217, 226, 265, 305 123, 129, 130, 132, 135, 138,
community, 3, 5, 11, 14, 20, 24, 25, 140, 141, 143–145, 147, 148,
33, 43, 46, 65, 81, 90, 91, 94, 161, 162, 167, 181, 184, 191,
95, 109, 112–115, 118, 121, 195, 200, 223, 233, 247
122, 131, 160, 164, 178, embodiment, 11, 61, 65, 75–78, 81,
182–185, 194–196, 201, 91, 99, 106, 123, 148, 161, 196
213–215, 219, 220, 222–224, emotion, 2, 5, 12, 57, 142, 161, 167,
270, 277, 280, 290, 292, 294, 168, 231–234, 236, 239, 241,
295, 297, 298 252, 253, 303
controversy, 234
energy, 11, 88, 140, 142, 164,
COVID-19, 7, 8, 56, 78, 117, 161,
259–265, 270, 278
172, 178, 261, 270
creativity, 7, 54, 55, 71, 197, 265 environment, 2, 3, 11, 52, 75, 76, 80,
crip theory, 196, 201 85, 92, 93, 105–107, 113–115,
crisis, 5, 10, 14, 23–25, 31, 86, 92, 118, 120, 121, 123, 158–164,
161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 189, 173, 186, 190, 191, 197, 200,
216, 235, 249, 260, 290, 299 211, 217, 220, 232, 234, 235,
244, 248, 251, 252, 262, 274
environmental humanities, 7, 92, 99,
D 240
decoloniality, 9–11, 178, 208, 221, environmental justice, 2, 3, 8, 20, 25,
224, 226 33, 47, 53–55, 76–78, 91, 160,
degrowth, 5, 7, 12, 157, 160, 164, 180, 182–184, 192, 196,
178–183, 187, 188, 191, 192, 197, 200, 240, 265, 306
194–196, 198–201 ethics, 3, 5, 8, 12, 25, 77, 107, 111,
development, 3, 4, 7, 10, 14, 23, 26, 113, 114, 121, 123, 138,
36, 61, 79, 80, 109, 131, 134, 142–148, 156, 157, 172, 173,
156, 158–162, 174, 184, 190, 193–195, 220, 226, 233, 244,
197, 212, 221, 223, 244, 260, 249
263, 294, 298, 302
Eurocentric, 5, 6, 11, 158, 161, 167,
dialogue, 1, 2, 7, 10–12, 14, 20, 22,
199, 209, 216
24, 25, 31, 36, 39, 46, 105, 107,
108, 118, 158, 159, 207, 217, everyday, 2, 5–7, 10, 12, 23–25, 31,
220, 226, 231–236, 243, 248, 36, 43, 52, 54, 55, 58, 60, 67,
253, 265, 289, 291, 292, 299, 89, 91, 93, 105–111, 115, 116,
303, 306, 307 118, 120, 121, 123, 134, 135,
138, 144, 164, 165, 173,
191–193, 198, 199, 209–212,
E 221–223, 225, 245, 264
earthcare, 181, 185–188, 191 everyday life, 57, 80, 94, 96, 107,
embodied, 2, 3, 5–8, 10–13, 54, 59, 111, 114, 121, 144–146, 157,
61–63, 67, 76–79, 81, 85, 91, 159, 160, 163, 173, 174, 193,
INDEX 313
211, 216, 217, 220, 222, 225, Global South, 3, 12, 24, 25, 29, 39,
295 43, 86, 156, 161, 163, 170, 180,
extractivism, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9–11, 20, 222, 232, 248
23–27, 29–31, 35, 36, 39, 43, Greece, 77, 78, 83, 86
46, 47, 51–56, 59–61, 64–67, greenwashing, 10, 30, 38
70, 71, 157, 162, 194, 239, 250
H
F health, 1, 2, 9, 11, 14, 75–78, 80–87,
feminism, 3, 6, 9, 12, 24, 80, 82, 91–95, 97–99, 106, 107, 114,
166, 167, 199, 201, 216–220, 119, 135, 137, 138, 144, 156,
232, 235–237, 241, 304 162, 164, 165, 168, 188–191,
feminist degrowth, 5 195–198, 200, 224, 225, 235,
feminist methodology, 11 237, 238, 243
Feminist political ecology (FPE), 1–9,
11–14, 20, 23–26, 47, 52, 53,
55, 56, 65, 67, 70, 75–78, 88, I
92, 98, 99, 105, 107, 108, 115, imagination, 11, 212, 240, 250, 264,
116, 118, 120–123, 131, 147, 265
148, 156, 157, 159–161, 167, India, 6, 13, 60, 129, 130, 133, 134,
178–181, 186, 187, 191, 192, 188, 193, 194, 200, 209
194, 195, 198–200, 207, 208, Indonesia, 6, 10, 22–24, 27, 31, 32,
214, 221, 226, 231, 233–235, 39, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 63,
244, 253, 265, 282, 291, 302, 66, 222–225
308 intergenerational, 3, 8, 9, 12–14, 79,
feminist theory, 2, 157, 264, 265, 123, 156, 166, 174, 218, 239,
291 244
fracking, 35 intersectional, 4, 7–9, 11–14, 77, 81,
futures, 9, 11, 80, 144, 145, 167, 93, 95, 96, 98, 107, 108, 120,
179, 183, 196–199, 226, 239, 131, 158, 159, 173, 181, 195,
248–250, 259, 260, 263, 265, 196
266, 270, 280, 282 Italy, 6, 14, 77, 79, 81, 82, 95, 97,
158, 197, 235, 252, 296
G
gender, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 76, J
131, 134, 158–160, 165, 166, Japan, 105–109, 122, 123
178, 180, 182, 188–191, 198, justice, 5, 7, 12, 14, 25, 54, 77, 79,
200, 209, 210, 215–218, 220, 80, 82, 94, 96, 98, 119, 144,
223, 234, 242, 244, 245, 263, 158, 159, 178, 181, 185,
291 190–192, 196, 239, 240, 244,
gender studies, 291, 308 245, 259
314 INDEX
K neo-Malthusianism, 237, 242

Kenya, 10, 22–24, 28, 39 network, 4, 6–8, 10, 14, 46, 54, 55,
kin, 183, 199, 200, 240, 248, 249, 78, 81, 84, 89, 95, 96, 99, 107,
252 110, 111, 115–117, 119, 120,
kinship, 183, 184, 191, 196, 197, 123, 132, 141, 167, 172, 173,
212, 240 178, 194, 219, 243, 301
knowledge, 2–5, 7–12, 23, 24, 29, numbers, 84, 96, 160, 178, 186, 232,
47, 55, 56, 59, 76, 78, 79, 81, 235, 237–240, 242–248, 250,
91, 92, 95–99, 115–117, 122, 252
131, 132, 134, 139, 144, 148,
158, 160, 161, 165–168, 190,
193, 196, 199, 208, 212, 213, O
215, 217, 231, 240, 241, 243, oil, 10, 20, 23, 26, 38, 83, 221
246, 250, 264, 265, 269, 275, oil palm, 10, 23, 24, 27, 30, 39, 43,
289–293, 300, 301, 303, 304, 222, 223, 225
306, 308 the other, 208, 211, 218, 223, 224
knowledge production, 3, 8, 78, 81,
82, 161, 210, 217, 304
P
pastoralism, 28, 43
L patriarchy, 7, 24, 52, 71, 81, 185,
livelihood, 7, 14, 26, 29, 39, 86, 109, 190, 192, 239, 267
119, 120, 122, 138, 185, 270 pedagogies, 169
pluriverse, 160, 217
political ecology, 4, 7, 9, 60, 139,
M 212–214, 247
more-than-human, 5, 6, 8–10, 13, political subject, 131, 209, 212–216
26, 47, 56, 66, 71, 91, 129–132, population control, 10, 12, 233, 242,
134, 135, 138, 139, 141–148, 246
156–162, 166, 173, 174, 181, porosity, 11, 76, 91, 98, 173
186, 191, 193–195, 200, 232, positionality, 57, 138, 148, 157, 222,
240, 259 224
power, 4, 5, 8, 10, 24–26, 52, 65,
71, 77, 78, 81, 93, 96, 107, 119,
N 120, 123, 130–132, 140,
Naples, 81 142–144, 146–148, 157, 167,
narrative, 4, 5, 9, 10, 20, 22, 23, 25, 172, 179–181, 192, 209,
31, 36, 38, 39, 55, 56, 59, 211–215, 217–220, 222–224,
63–65, 67, 75, 80, 82, 92, 96, 226, 237, 238, 240, 259, 261,
99, 108, 121, 131, 132, 137, 264, 265, 270, 279, 282, 296,
141, 144, 147, 160, 186, 192, 298
193, 209, 214, 217, 263–265 practices of care, 123, 156, 162, 163,
natureculture, 249 167, 168, 174, 178
INDEX 315
Q subjectivities, 5, 7, 13, 77, 92, 130,

queer ecologies, 165, 167 131, 135, 138, 139, 141, 143,
146, 147, 226, 233
R
reciprocity, 5, 47, 82, 181, 220, 221,
305 T
reflexivity, 222 technology, 4, 76, 94, 98, 110, 136,
reproduction, 5, 11, 92, 157, 180, 168, 184, 196, 240, 245, 247,
181, 186, 187, 191, 197, 200, 249, 263, 279
234, 240, 242, 244, 251, 301, territory, 6, 13, 79, 138, 139, 143,
302 148, 216–220, 270, 290, 292,
resistance, 7, 8, 10, 52, 56, 59, 293, 296, 299, 301, 304, 305,
63–66, 89, 90, 185, 187, 198, 308
199, 216, 217, 219, 234, 237,
264, 293
U
United Kingdom (UK), 6, 10, 14, 22,
S
23, 31, 32, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60,
Science and Technology Studies
61, 63, 238, 241
(STS), 76, 135, 147, 148, 231
settling, 115, 290, 293, 296 United State of America (USA), 6
social movements, 7, 97, 156, 159, urban studies, 118
163, 169, 179, 197, 212, 217 Uruguay, 6, 105–108, 115–117,
socionature, 107, 108, 111, 131, 158, 119–123
249
solidarity, 11, 25, 35, 63–66, 71, 78,
164, 165, 220, 221, 265 W
Spain, 6, 13, 14, 61, 129, 130, 140, water, 2, 13, 14, 24, 47, 83, 85, 93,
142, 147 110, 129–144, 146–148, 160,
storytelling, 2, 8, 9, 11, 138, 160, 167, 173, 189, 190, 193, 212,
162, 167, 174, 245, 248, 261, 219, 270, 274, 279
263–265, 280, 282 Western tradition, 186

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GENDER, DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIAL CHANGE

SERIES EDITOR: WENDY HARCOURT

ISSN 2730-7328 ISSN 2730-7336 (electronic)

Cover credit: WOMEN SPACES INVIO

We are living in troubling times: the ongoing coronavirus pandemic

(WEGO), a group which provided the foundation for rich intergenera-

with processes of extraction, exploitation and resistance in communi-

Brighton, UK Lyla Mehta

Lyla Mehta is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies

We would like to thank all the allies, friends, partners, administrators,

1 Sketching Out the Contours 1

6 More-Than-Human Co-becomings: The

Ana Agostino (co-editor) has a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the

current research explores the socionatural transformations of irrigation

from 2021–2023. Her research interests are on care, social reproduction,

community-grounded food and agriculture and the feminist political

and logging shaped ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality on Kalimantan

team of the 8th International Degrowth Conference: Caring Commu-

looking at the entanglements of agroecology and feminism in rural–urban

Sketching Out the Contours

Ana Agostino, Rebecca Elmhirst, Marlene Gómez,

© The Author(s) 2023 1

community, and strives to do non-extractive research through a participa-

Engaging with FPE Conversations

Mollett et al., 2020) and through decolonial and anticolonial ecolog-

show how environmental subjectivities are forged through relations with

expressing ideas of living and flourishing within ecological principles

WEGO-ITN: Collective Learning Process

different disciplines (political ecology, feminist studies, human geography,

contradictions, self-reflexivity, as well as the complexities of intergener-

Themes Emerging from the Book’s Conversations

histories and place-based complexities. Going beyond a mere comparison

experiences and learnings of co-curating a series of exhibitions and events

Where to Go from Here?

E. Olson, & J. M. Silva (Eds.), Routledge handbook of gender and feminist

Sundberg, J. (2004). Identities in the making: Conservation, gender and race

Untold Climate Stories: Feminist Political

Dian Ekowati, Siti Maimunah, Alice Owen,

D. Ekowati · A. Owen · R. Elmhirst (B)

© The Author(s) 2023 19

development”, and then went on to answer that threat by offering, among

Wangari reflects from her research on the gendered nature of environ-

Climate Coloniality: Extractivism as Root Cause

campaigns. Climate justice aligns with the environmentalism of the poor

26 in Glasgow. Febi Abdi, 25 years old, was a resident of Makroman

cultivated on a large-scale covers hundreds of thousands to millions of

grabs have severely compromised the community’s ability to respond to

the region. Somewhat inevitably such findings attracted prospective indus-

as described by Dian or rare earth mineral mining, as promoted by

Climate Vocabularies: Expanding

How Is the Vocabulary of Climate Change Dislocated

language, and implemented on a massive scale: they expand the operation

council, regulators, police and central government which overlooks and

a recorded message from campaigners in Mozambique bringing a legal

How Is a Mainstream Climate Narrative Expanding and Deepening

survival and resistance. One example is by associating the “climate” with

to concede economic prosperity to socio-ecological viability. At the Surrey

new or rebranded ‘green’ extractivisms. That extractivism can be legit-

The Coloniality of Climate Responses

focus ought to be on the production system rather than livestock and