I would like to mention three strategies which I think make universities 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 difficulties 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 *otherwise* 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 generation 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 implications 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. Probably 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 discussions 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 "natural" 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 timewe 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 anthropocentric 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 political, 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 practised 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.

**Funding:** 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.

#### References

Folbre, N. (1994). *Who pays for the kids?* Routledge.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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### 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 International Degrowth Conference held in The Hague in August 2021 with

G. Di Chiro Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
W. Harcourt (B) International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023 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\_8

177

S. Barca · I. Iengo · P. Kotsila University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

the theme of "caring communities for radical change".1 In this introduction 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 theories 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 International 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<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
C. Sato Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
"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 alternatives 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 vulnerable groups and exacerbate injustice (Chertkovskaya et al., 2019; D'Alisa et al., 2014; Liegey et al., 2020; Paulson et al., 2020). Through interdisciplinary 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 interrelated 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 represented in the degrowth movement, and how subaltern, racialised, and 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 alternatives (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 political 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 culturally 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 (Gregoratti & 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 traditions (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 environmental 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 reproduction: 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 planetary 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 communities 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 reorganised 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, collectivised versus feminised care work in order to build just, sustainable, and 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 Conference 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 environmental 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 environmental 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 critical 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.  For whom do we reach out to as trusted partners for coordinated 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 recognition 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, environmental 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 "progressive" 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 operations, community land trusts, conservation areas, or recycling centres) without an anti/decolonial lens, sustains colonial land relations and "settler 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.

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 environmental 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 participating 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 opportunities 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 emphasise 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 incinerator". 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 Reproduction* (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 "traditional", 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, 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.  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 environment. 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 environmental 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 unrecognised in mainstream narratives of the catastrophic earth-system change epoch that scientists have called the Anthropocene. This invisibilisation 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 stateproductivist 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 relations, 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 accumulation 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 contradiction 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 relations 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 political 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 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 politics 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 disenfranchised 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. Typically, 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 transporting 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. Menstruating 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 subsistence 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 understanding 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., ecological farming and climate smart agriculture), often gloss over the unpaid or non-wage care work of women. Ecological health and the contributions 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 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 discrimination 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 developed 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 domination 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 environments and threaten life itself. Thus, care can signal the need to put life and the everyday activities that ensure the physical and emotional wellbeing 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 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, horizontally, 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 questioning 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 material 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 collaboration 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 traditionally 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 influence 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, increasingly 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, indebtedness; 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 communities 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 struggles, 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 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, exploitation 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 reflections, 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-thanhuman 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 productive is the labour that produces more surplus, and more-than-human earthothers are objects to be consumed in production. These three reflections make visible how these relations and practices disrupt kin-centric relationships between humans and earthothers. The combination of antiessentialist 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 communities 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 perspective 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 understanding 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 oppressions 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 multifaceted understandings of social and ecological health that complicate the binary thinking which posits and understands human and more-thanhuman 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 anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-heteropatriarchal, and decolonial coalitionbuilding 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 conversation 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. Occupational 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 communities 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 conceptions 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 nonseparation 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 organising" such as new collectivities, alternative care-based institutions, and accessibility hubs and "homespaces" that are "continuing to save everyone'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", a fantasy based on the cultural illusions of individualism and selfsufficiency that can only be sustained by devaluing and making invisible the essential social reproductive labour performed by women, workingclass 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 incorporates 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 performances. 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 transformative 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 decolonial 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 communities 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 analytical starting points. We share a relational ontology and belief in the importance of intersectionality in shaping environmentally just futures. In 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 recognised as central to both social and ecological reproduction of humans, economies, and lifeworlds. What we have pointed to is the radical potential 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 communities 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 experiences 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 attention 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.

**Funding:** 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.

#### References

*Environments*. https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2020/04/07/withinand-beyond-the-pandemic-demanding-a-care-income-and-a-feminist-greennew-deal-for-europe/

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### 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 inexhaustible and therefore too vast for the scope of this chapter, we choose instead to piece together some of our intimate understandings of decolonial 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.

D. Ekowati

© The Author(s) 2023

The order of the authors is alphabetical order. It does not reflect the commitment and responsibilities of authors' contributions.

WEGO Innovative Training Network, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
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\_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 chapter'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 trajectories 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 accommodate 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) Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
I. Monterroso Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
A. Shrestha University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
must contend with. The coloniser does not ask for the native's permission; 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 ahistorical<sup>2</sup> technicality of being a sovereign nation sits oddly with the way developmentalist 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 'decolonial' 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

<sup>1</sup> 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.

<sup>2</sup> 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 difference 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 knowledge 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 movement—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 ontological 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 historical 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 postcolonial 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 perpetually 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 transcend itself (Nietzsche, 1967). I propose then that the decolonial subject extends itself towards the political, as it forces us to re-evaluate the categories 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 encounters 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 decolonial 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 decolonial 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 knowledge and practice. This entails the recognition of forests as relational places, inquiring about the boundaries of forest ecosystems as defined

<sup>3</sup>*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).

<sup>4</sup> 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 nonhumans, 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 political 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 scholarship 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 conservation 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 perspectives 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 territorialisation 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 legitimacy, what is legitimate and how legitimacy is constructed (Fraser, 2015; Habermas, 1975). Elements in contemporary governmental assemblages—"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 highlands 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 communities as protected areas were established and different management models were discussed to recognise "environmental subjects". Forest communities' 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 establishment 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 community groups, and diluted the diversity of age, gender, and ethnicity, reducing the ability to address underlying social differentiation and exclusion 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 deforestation (Grandia, 2012; Ybarra, 2017). This shows how colonial legacies of structural racism strongly influence governmental environmental assemblages, 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 conservation 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—unconsciously 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 undergraduate, 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 understandings of life. Thirdly, I will briefly touch upon political projects that

<sup>5</sup> 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 transformation. 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. Decolonial 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 hierarchically 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 production in daily practices, and embracing plural dialogues and imaginaries, are the vehicles and tools that nourish a political project for change. Nowadays, 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 hierarchies, besieged by multiple violences. Understanding the modern body as a colonial legacy allows us to understand it in relation to a territory 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 relationships 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 practice 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, discomfort, and hierarchies, the body is intersected by patterns of power that are historically related to our territory; patterns which trigger a systematic 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 continuously 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 traditional 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 practices 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 conception 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 understand 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 territoriality 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 reproductive 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 relationships, 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 problematic. The proposal for this is to reassess and rearticulate care dynamics from a collective perspective where care is not unidirectional but multidirectional (Gómez-Becerra & Muneri-Wangari, 2021) in connection to body and territory needs.

 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 relational 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 reflexivity 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 experience 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, physically 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 communities 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 otherwise. Later, when we would visit the community, there was often another awkwardness—the community called us all from "Jakarta '' or the "centre", 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).

<sup>6</sup> 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 historical instances of oppression and discrimination from Javanese ethnicity (the centre) towards **other**7 ethnicities and Moslem (the centre) towards **other**8 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 Indigenous 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 remembered 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 fieldwork, 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.

<sup>9</sup> 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 colonial 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 individual 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 engendered by those meanings and shared subjectivities have shaped our past and continue to shape our futures.

**Funding:** 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.

#### References

Dupuis, & J. Gaybor (Eds.), *Feminist methodologies experiments, collaborations and reflections*. Palgrave Macmillan.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### 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, University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. Fenner e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023 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\_10

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(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, anticolonial) 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 'multispecies 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, feminist 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 (Hartmann, 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, international policy focus moved away from a discourse of the "population bomb" or "overpopulation" towards the concept of sexual and reproductive 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 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: 'Increasingly, 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 structure 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'