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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 forms of life-making in contexts marked by necropolitics. It draws on an ethnography of the Mingas del Buen Vivir—collective labor practices with Indigenous roots—through which the Espacio Alina has been built since 2020 in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. Convened by the 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 while participating in community health practices promoted by the Kurdish Women’s Movement in northern Syria, the Espacio is grounded in a dialogue between Latin American and Kurdish feminisms. Central to its constitution was the donation of the land by Alina’s mother, an act through which grief is transformed into a memorial practice that contests necropolitical logics of disposability and inscribes the Espacio within Argentine traditions of mothers’ activism and memory politics.

Drawing on 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 spectacular death or state violence alone, I analyze how memories of activist women whose lives were taken become forces which act across generations and geographies. These practices reconfigure grief as pedagogy and an affective archive, through which collective labor, spirituality, and body–territory imaginaries sustain feminist life-making and contest necropolitics regulate whose lives are grievable.