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Paper short abstract

An ethnography of Mingas del Buen Vivir examines how memory politics become feminist pedagogies of life-making. Focusing on a community space in Argentina built through collective labor, the paper explores how grief and joy operate as political forces linking Latin American and Kurdish feminisms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how collective emotions, memory politics, and embodied pedagogies sustain feminist life-making practices in contexts marked by violence and dispossession. It draws on an ethnography of the Mingas del Buen Vivir—collective labor practices with Latin American Indigenous roots—through which the Espacio Alina has been built since 2020 in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. Convened by the popular education collective Pañuelos en Rebeldía, the Espacio is a site where material construction, ecological practices, and feminist learning unfold, bringing together activists transnationally.

Named after Alina, an Argentine medical doctor who lost her life in a car accident in northern Syria while participating in community health practices promoted by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, the Espacio is grounded in a transnational dialogue between Latin American and Kurdish feminist epistemologies. Central to its constitution was the donation of the land by Alina’s mother, an act that transforms grief into a community-building gesture, inscribing it within Argentine traditions of mothers´ activism.

Drawing on long-term participant observation as a co-constructor in the Mingas, I explore how bodies and territories are re-signified as spaces of memory, political grammars, alternative pedagogies, and embodied forms of resistance. Rather than focusing on the effects of state and extractivist violence, I analyze how memories of activist women whose lives were taken become forces that continue to act across generations and geographies as a living pedagogy and an affective archive, where grief, spirituality, collective labor, and body–territory imaginaries intertwine to produce feminist practices of world-making.