Paper short abstract:

How do women's networks negotiate and reinvent practices of care and mutual support? How can everyday economics be approached as a tool for imagining and creating gifts and futures by challenging and destabilizing standards, parameters, metrics and norms of "Economics" in a strict sense?

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research among young people and their families on Santiago Island, this proposal presents analytical reflections on support and care networks among Cape Verdean women of different generations, both in rural and urban contexts. Mutual aid practices, historically consolidated in Cape Verdean society under the name of "djunta mon" (joining hands), are mobilized by women in their daily lives and in the achievement of their life and family projects. These practices, when performed by women, establish a strong relationship with an ethic of care and a sense of collectivity. In the sharing of tasks and care, these women create, share and mantain experiences, knowledge, techniques, memories, and worldviews. As a result of flexible family arrangements that include consanguineous and related people, caregiving also has a communitarian character. Care is understood here as a complex weave of creating and sustaining life and living that can take differentiated and mobile forms, connecting different spheres and entities, both human and non-human, as well as institutions, groups, and individuals. Most of the processes that move families and communities pass through the hands of women who come together in the creation and maintenance of a daily economy. In this regard, such an everyday economy will be approached as a tool for imagination and creation of presents and futures by challenging and destabilizing standards, parameters, metrics and norms of "Economics" in a strict sense, as well as negotiates and reinvents practices and networks of care and mutual support.