Caring for Earth: decoloniality and feminisms in dialogue

Abstract                          

This paper elaborates the concept of Earthcare as an epistemic exercise of academic interdisciplinary dialogue between decoloniality and feminism and as an ethical-political exercise of openness, deep listening and search of new understandings nurtured by the encounter with others outside academia. We define Earthcare as a way of being and becoming in territory with/on the Earth. Earthcare offers a relational mode of being with other humans and more-than-humans that make a cultivation and flourishing of life possible. Learning from three diverse places in Argentina, South Africa and Australia, we explore how Earthcare helps us to address the processes of expropriation in (historical and current) capital accumulation including expropriation of women’s social reproduction, historical and ongoing coloniality, racialised expropriation, Indigenous dispossession and ecological dispossession through the socio-environmental crisis. We address these crises looking at how care matters given that the world is interconnected and relational, paying attention to care as a political project that strives to make our collective worlds better.

Keywords

Feminist movements, decoloniality, dispossession, land, territories, allyship, pluriverse, life worlds.

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