scholarly journals Practices of Care in Times of COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlene Gómez Becerra ◽  
Eunice Muneri-Wangari

We argue that the COVID-19 virus has been a trigger for emerging practices of care by being an actor with agency that transforms the everyday life of subjects by placing them under uncertainty. Therefore, this paper aims to show how practices of care emerged or were maintained as vulnerable groups were confronted by restrictions to movement and uncertainties following the outbreak of COVID-19. We demonstrate this using two case studies of the Maasai pastoral community in Narok, Kenya and the community kitchens in the city of Berlin, Germany. Thus, we seek to show how practices of care for, care about, and care with are carried out by the members of these communities during pandemic times. Granted that care remains highly contentious in feminist literature, this paper contributes to a growing body of literature on care in Feminist Political Ecology by broadening the conceptualization of care. The research builds on a typology of care relations based on practices of distribution, exchange, and reciprocity. This allows us to show when care is exercised in a unidirectional and hierarchical way and when in a multidirectional way reinforcing social bonds of responsibility and collective care that transcends the socio-nature boundaries.

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nik Heynen

Given the ongoing importance of nature in the city, better grappling with the gendering and queering of urban political ecology offers important insights that collectively provides important political possibilities. The cross-currents of feminist political ecology, queer ecology, queer urbanism and more general contributions to feminist urban geography create critical opportunities to expand UPE’s horizons toward more egalitarian and praxis-centered prospects. These intellectual threads in conversation with the broader Marxist roots of UPE, and other second-generation variants, including what I have previously called abolition ecology, combine to at once show the ongoing promises of heterodox UPE and at the same time contribute more broadly beyond the realm of UPE.


Author(s):  
Bernadette P. Resurrección

This chapter applies a feminist political ecology lens to episodes of climate change-related water insecurity in three Southeast Asian peri-urban area sites affected by flooding, water shortages, and pollution induced by long dry spells and heavy precipitation. It presents highlights from a 3-year research project that examined the everyday lives of women as they “deal with water” in the context of increasing water pollution, water scarcity, and flooding compounded by neoliberal socioeconomic conditions. These accounts illustrate how in water- and climate-change contexts, the neoliberal logics of privatization, commercialization, and reified separation between “the natural” and “the social” engage closely with emotions and intersectional gender subjectivities. The use of a feminist political ecology lens offers more holistic and grounded ways of probing into people’s experiences of climate-related water insecurity and stresses, aspects of which are often missed: gendered violence, hierarchies of place, affect, and insecurity in everyday life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Perry ◽  
Josephine Gillespie

Environmental conservation through the creation of protected areas is recognised as a key tactic in the fight against degrading ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the implications of protected area regimes on both places and people is an important part of the protection agenda. In this context and in this paper, we build on the work of feminist legal geographers and feminist political ecologists to enhance our understanding of the constitution of localised socio-legal-environmental interactions in and around protected areas. Our approach looks to developments in feminist and legal geographic thought to examine the interactions between identities, law and the environment in a Ramsar protected wetland on the Tonle Sap, Cambodia. We bring together legal geography perspectives regarding the spatiality of law with insights from feminist political ecology examining gendered roles and exclusions. We found that conservation areas interact in complex ways with local pre-existing norms prescribing female weakness and vulnerability which, ultimately, restrict women’s spatial lives.


2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdouMaliq Simone

Abstract:In contemporary urban Africa, the turbulence of the city requires incessant innovation that is capable of generating new ways of being. Rather than treating popular culture as some distinctive sector, this article attempts to investigate the popular as methods of bringing together activities and actors that on the surface would not seem compatible, and as experimental forms of generating value in the everyday life of urban residents. This investigation, sited largely in Douala, Cameroon, looks at how youth from varying neighborhoods attempt to get by, and at the unexpected forms of contestation that can ensue.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic

How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. ‘Place’ encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; ‘body’ takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and ‘story’ refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.


Author(s):  
Meredith Dale ◽  
Josefine Heusinger ◽  
Birgit Wolter

Chapter 5 examines the impact of gentrification processes in Berlin, Germany, on the distribution of older people across the city as well as the everyday experiences of ageing in socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The chapter concludes with an overview of developments in the context of political processes, where urban transformation driven by economic interests generates growing conflict and contradiction with the needs of an ageing and increasingly less affluent population.


2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solange Muñoz

This article expands on current conceptualizations and applications of precarity by exploring the everyday socio-spatial complexities of migrant squatters living in informal hotels in the center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through ethnographic methods, this research investigates squatters’ practices of negotiating access to shared domestic spaces and resources, while experiencing long-term waiting for eviction from their home and potentially from the city center. Employing a cultural geographies approach, this work is concerned with understanding the ways in which precarity is routinely experienced in the micro-spaces of everyday life. Precarity is examined in its temporal and spatial manifestations, with particular emphasis on gendered experiences and home-making practices. Moving through daily spaces and routine situations, I document how precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place-making practices and responsibilities.


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