Presentation short abstract

A presentation of participatory action research (PAR) with garment and textile workers in India. The method and workshop were conducted through sewing, patching, and narrative building, revealing the ontologies and practices of care, which play out as both emancipatory and confining.

Presentation long abstract

My research focuses on garment workers in India, who migrate from rural villages and forgo subsistence livelihoods for labour-intensive factory work in urban areas. The migration is a result of changing biophysical conditions (e.g., depleting groundwater, soil degradation) and lack of jobs and income. As most of the garment workers are women from Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities, their choice to leave the village is also political, as they reject caste practices, patriarchy, and gender norms while gaining autonomy in the city. However, their entanglement with new forms of casteism and gender specificities places them in new forms of precarity under the sphere of modernisation (neoliberalism) within the urban environment.

The presentation aims to illustrate the workers' narratives, which they shared through the PAR method of sewing and patching together the anatomy of a garment. The intention of the workshop was to replicate the factory work process at a much slower pace while reflecting on their histories and lived experiences. I will discuss the outcomes and the challenges along with their narratives on care. The notion of 'care' manifests in both rural and urban geographies. Their understanding of ‘care’ is ambivalent: at times the act is attaining freedom through resistances, and at times it is burdensome and confining, while also being appropriated by the ‘state’ and ‘transnational corporations’. The presentation will also reflect on how ecology, geography and the relationship of the workers with the environment are understood and perceived through this study.

Presentation short abstract

This study explores community seed banks in Baringo County, Kenya, in which various forms of care are cultivated. Using a feminist political ecology lens, we examine how these informal seed banks are evolving as sites of resistance, seeking to transform how local food systems are experienced.

Presentation long abstract

This paper will explore community seed banks in Baringo County, Kenya, in which various forms of care are cultivated. ‘Seeds are living relations’ is a common understanding among many peasant and Indigenous communities. Seeds reveal connections to a shared history, anticipated futures, and the interconnections between markets, governance, and the social reproduction of food systems. This paper examines how seeds are collected, stored and shared through community seed banks in Baringo County, Kenya, and how the community seed banks themselves become spaces cultivating various forms of care - of bodies, knowledges, ecosystems, and relations. Based on a five-year engagement with farmers through the Seed Savers Network in Gilgil, Kenya and using a feminist political ecology lens, the paper will present an analysis of how the development, access, and control over seed banks influence broader socio-economic relations to food sovereignty, climate resilience, and care labour. In the context of the recent November 2025 court ruling that overturned the criminalization of informal seed sharing amongst farmers, seed banks are evolving as sites of resistance, knowledge sharing, movement building, and social reproduction that demonstrate long-term implications for transforming rural livelihoods, ecosystems, and how local food systems are experienced. The paper considers ontologies of care through the ethics, the political-economic and gendered implications of managing informal seed banks, and how labour, governance, and the well-being of communities reflect and inform the life of seeds.

Presentation short abstract

I present ethnographic material (photographs, video and objects) to explore care in human-plant relations. I follow bamboo across different spaces (forests, workshops, design studios and shops) to reveal the meanings and values tied to bamboo and its dissemination in global green imaginaries.

Presentation long abstract

Bamboo is widely promoted as an eco-friendly and innovative material able to support nature-based solutions to forest degradation, plastic pollution and poverty, often hiding the everyday material and affective practices carried out by rural producers, artisans, and community organizations. Drawing on feminist political ecology and multi-sited qualitative research, in this presentation, I use visual ethnographic and sensory material, photographs, video and fibres to explore care in human-plant relations. The visual material follows bamboo across different spaces (i.e. forests, workshops, studios and shops) to reveal the different meanings and values associated with bamboo and its dissemination in global green imaginaries. This visual material explores material and affective relations in sustaining bamboo landscapes and the tensions between green consumerism and ecological care work. The presentation also explores how visual storytelling can be used in the analysis of caring human-plant relations.

Presentation short abstract

This paper shows how geopolitical tensions shape environmental care practices and politics. Focusing on Baltic food sovereignty debates, it traces competing care regimes and the power dynamics that structure care across macro and micro scales.

Presentation long abstract

The literature on agri- and environmental care has provided insightful conceptual approaches for thinking about the ways in which care intersects with environmental politics. Yet these approaches tend to overlook the historical and geopolitical situatedness of caring practices and relations. Addressing this gap, this paper examines food sovereignty politics in the Baltic states—Lithuania in particular—to consider how geopolitical tensions shape practices of caring for land. In a region where the war in Ukraine has renewed concerns about ontological security, food sovereignty debates expose competing visions of care, including (1) autarchic care, which frames land as national territory to be protected; (2) neoliberal or developmentalist care, which equates economic growth and participation in global capitalist markets with care for the state and its citizens; (3) smallholder mutual-aid and solidarity care, advanced by local and global peasant movements such as La Via Campesina; (4) gendered domestic care, rooted in self-provisioning and reproductive labor; and (5) more-than-human care networks grounded in everyday multi-species encounters. By tracing how these care regimes intersect and conflict in Lithuania’s public debates and policies, the paper highlights complex power dynamics operating at macro and micro scales. The analysis foregrounds tensions within care itself—between recognizing relationality and interdependencies, on the one hand, and efforts to establish sovereignty under conditions of geopolitical vulnerability and the forces of commodification and exploitation in industrial capitalism, on the other. Overall, the paper shows how environmental care is tied to sovereignty politics, situating resilience within intimate economies of labor, subsistence, obligation, and inter-species relations.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the long-term socio-ecological and emotional harms of illegal gold mining in northern Cauca, Colombia, through Afro-Colombian communities’ relationships with two rivers.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the long-term socio-ecological, emotional and relational harms of illegal gold mining in northern Cauca, Colombia, focusing on Afro-Colombian communities’ relations with rivers. Drawing on political ecology, feminist geography, and posthuman scholarship on place, emotions, and care, I develop the concept of slow relational harm to capture how extractivism disrupts the networks of meaning and practice that humans and more-than-human beings weave together to sustain life. I argue that these harms extend beyond material destruction, embedding themselves in affective and sensitive relations that shape everyday life and place-based identities. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork, including narrative interviews with community members. The analysis focuses on the crucial more-than-human entanglements between people and the rivers Quinamayó and Agua Limpio, to show how emotional and relational dynamics mediate harm and possibilities for care. Findings reveal that emotions express the disruption of life-sustaining relations with rivers while also guiding resilience and forms of more-than-human care. These affective responses illuminate how extractivist violence is produced, experienced, and resisted, challenging the assumption that slow harms are invisible. By integrating relational, emotional, and more-than-human perspectives, this study contributes to feminist and decolonial critiques of extractivism, emphasizing that reparation must address not only material restoration but also the ethical and emotional capacities to sustain socio-ecological life.

Presentation short abstract

This research explores how collective practices of care and social reproduction in Barcelona’s public spaces re-signify urban life, challenging neoliberal security policies and fostering a transfeminist reimagining of the city through embodied resistance and desire.

Presentation long abstract

This research focuses on the city of Barcelona and examines the relationship between space, time, and body as a central axis for understanding urban dynamics and the forms of exclusion produced by global and local security and prevention plans. These policies, embedded within a neoliberal framework, generate processes of displacement and expulsion of Otherness from public space, reinforcing vulnerabilities tied to the commodification of the city. Building on Cooper’s Everyday Utopias (2016) and redefining utopia as a practice, the central research question guiding this work is: how can the collective work of social reproduction in Barcelona’s urban public space, carried out by groups that transgress socio-spatial codes, contribute to a political re-signification of those spaces?

The hypothesis argues that the processes of reappropriation of neighborhoods by non-normative and desiring bodies generate transformations that place care and life at the center of a new conception of the space–time relationship. The study suggests that inhabiting public space with these bodies constitutes a political and affective practice that challenges the sexist and racist rhetoric of “citizen security,” opening up new forms of resistance and self-organization. Through the analysis of urban policies and local legislation in Barcelona from the late 1990s to the present, the research traces the effects of urban transformations and the responses of social movements. In this context, desire functions as a compass for imagining a possible transfeminist city, where connections, care, and everyday utopias act as transformative forces.

Presentation short abstract

This talk explores frictions and dilemmas emerging in dancing-with Utterslev marsh as a multispecies care practice in more-than-human ecologies. I ask how relations and (a)symmetries of care are reshuffled, as I recognise that perhaps the marsh is my caregiver rather than the other way around.

Presentation long abstract

Since 2020, I have been dancing on a platform by Utterslev marsh, a nature-culture in Copenhagen. The marsh is protected, recognized as the second-largest designated natural area in Copenhagen; a lively and living place, full of birds, snails, insects. However, the marsh is also heavily polluted, and the pollution occasionally results in mass death of fish and other animals by asphyxiation.

Utterslev marsh is a place I grieve, love and try to care for. I feel that we have become witnesses, friends and kin. I started dancing on the platform during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark, a very lonely time in my life. I would go to the platform almost every morning; I would watch the seasons and the weather change. I would notice more and more with each morning, with each passing year.

Dancing, I honor the ecologies and multi-species lifeworlds of the marsh. I offer my time, the energies and the movements of my body. Dance is a form of embodied listening, of moving-with, a caress in motion.

At the same time, I am haunted by questions of what I really (can) do for the marsh, questioning myself as an invader. I feel that my dancing perhaps mostly benefits me. I am but a recipient of the care from the marsh. This re-positioning, while ripe with ethical dilemmas, offers possibilities for practicing gratitude, porosity, for un-mastering my ways of being-with the more-than-human world; and a re-shuffling of asymmetries in care relations.

Presentation short abstract

Based on ten months of fieldwork in Scotland and New Zealand, this presentation engages Gaelic and Māori as place-based Indigenous knowledges to rethink humans’ place in the natural world. I invite reflections on how to live by an ethics of care for those of us not embedded in these ontologies.

Presentation long abstract

At the intersection of the ecological, social, economic, and political crises, I argue, lies the profound disconnection between humans and nature, which is essential to the functioning of capitalism. The dominant Western worldview, which negates nature's agency and views humans as superior beings, legitimises human domination and exploitation of nature for profit-making endeavours. Therefore, aligning with the panel’s intention to explore what it means to resist capitalist extraction and disposability through developing an ethics of care with the more-than-human, I mobilise Indigenous relational ethics. My presentation is based on ten months of fieldwork for my PhD, conducted between September and June 2026 in Alba/Scotland and in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I suggest that engaging with and carving out space for Indigenous knowledges is essential in times of poly crisis. Both Gaelic and Māori are place-based Indigenous knowledges which entertain a relational view of humans’ place in the natural world, not as superior but as interconnected. Engaging with Gaelic and Māori offers different experiences and conceptualisations of care and reciprocity with the more-than-human across diverse geographies, which can motivate behaviours that resist capitalist models of alienation, exploitation and extraction. Embracing the panel’s patchwork style, I seek to combine theoretical reflections with narrative accounts of stories, tales, and experiences gathered during fieldwork in my presentation. I wish to open a space for those of us, not embedded in these place-based relational ontologies, to think about how to live by an ethics of care with more-than-human while resisting Western neo-colonial appropriation of Indigenous cultures.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores urban nature conservation in Helsinki as a contested space where care operates as both generative and ambivalent. It examines how conservation practices shape values, impose hierarchies, and raise ethical questions, proposing situated care for multispecies futures.

Presentation long abstract

Amid accelerating urbanisation and biodiversity decline, conservation landscapes are increasingly framed as sites of refuge and ecological repair. Yet the practices that sustain these spaces are deeply entangled with ethical negotiations, asymmetries of power, and contested visions of care. Situating my presentation within the politically contested field of urban nature conservation in Helsinki, southern Finland, I will discuss how conservation interventions can portray care as both a generative and ambivalent force. While aimed at fostering conditions for more-than-human flourishing, practices of care simultaneously impose dominance, exclusions, and hierarchies of value. Examining how these conservation categories are instrumentalised in urban planning reveals the mechanisms through which different types of values are extracted from land. Consequently, environmental protection practices raise the question: who is being cared for, and at what, or whose expense?

Approaching nature reserves as more-than-human contact zones, I argue, allows us to acknowledge and navigate the emergent tensions that arise when differing ontologies encounter one another, highlighting the onto-ethical dimensions of the material constructedness of care in conservation practices (Lopez et al. 2025). By foregrounding attentiveness and response-ability (van Dooren et al. 2016), the presentation contributes to debates on care as resistance and alternative world-making in times of ecological crisis. Ultimately, I propose that cultivating care in urban conservation demands situated practices that challenge technocratic logics while imagining more convivial futures for multispecies life.

Presentation short abstract

We are proposing a multilingual, polyphonic and travelling Porte-paroles (Words-Carrier) which brings together experiences and practices of Water Care from all around the world in the form of an open, travelling and ongoing series of posters.

Presentation long abstract

Based on the metaphor of Confluence proposed by Brazilian quilombola thinker Antonio Bispo, we have initiated a series of posters called Porte-paroles (Fr.) or Words-Carrier (Eng.), as a cosmopolitical proposition for thinking with care about water in various regions of the world. The Confluence expresses the possibility that different kind of knowledge and understandings of water can flow and flourish together without canceling each other, without domination or hierarchy.

It is a method that encourage the confluence(s) of words and images that reveal the relational and practical commitment to caring for water in different places around the world. Water is cosmopolitical in that it is both universal and particular. The ways in which we relate to and care for it are also necessarily cosmopolitical. We bring together locally grounded voices about caring, living and relating to water, to foster exchange and dialogue that acknowledge water as an essential element of life and as and common good. Inspired by the work of John Law and Annemarie Mol (2020) we suggest to keep words (Cuidar in Spanish – Care in English – Uyaway in Quechua, Nuñūtun in Mapudungun – Prendre Soin in French, etc.) in their original system of signification to enrich care repertoires, and lean about their tensions. Our aim is to raise awareness of locally rooted Water Care practices, and the need to rethink water research methods by paying close attention to words, slowing down the translation process, and studying how words are enacted in different water practices.

Presentation short abstract

This research develops the concept of territoriality of care as a feminist, material, and embodied practice of mending relations between bodies and places. Grounded in situated research in a São Paulo (Brazil) community garden, it frames care as resistance, interdependence, and territorial becoming.

Presentation long abstract

This research develops territoriality of care as a conceptual and political lens to understand how communities produce life-sustaining relations through everyday resistance, repair, and embodied inhabitation of territory. Drawing from feminist and Latin-American political ecology, I approach care not as sentiment or service but as a material, relational, and contested practice through which people and places are continually remade. Territoriality of care emerges through the interplay of interdependence and autonomy, not oppositional forces, but mutually constitutive orientations that shape how communities negotiate vulnerability, collective action, and the right to inhabit space otherwise.

As a situated researcher working alongside a housing movement’s community garden in São Paulo - the Gera Juncal Community Garden - I ground this theoretical proposal in practices of cultivating, cooking, learning, and maintaining shared spaces. These practices exemplify how care mends fractured urban ecologies and creates conditions for territorial belonging amidst precarity, dispossession, and the ongoing labor of reproduction. Yet they also reveal tensions: unequal workloads, asymmetries of recognition, and the risk of care being co-opted into state or market agendas.

Thinking with the panel’s metaphor of patchwork, I conceptualize territoriality of care as a form of mending: a work of stitching together bodies, territories, and knowledges in ways that resist disposability and cultivate autonomy-in-relation. By foregrounding lived experiences, embodied attachments, and the quotidian labor of sustaining life, this contribution invites a rethinking of care as both political ecology and territorial praxis, capable of opening transformative horizons in times of fracture.

Presentation short abstract

This paper describes and reflects on the implications of the concept of care/memory towards fellow humans, non-humans and natural spaces as experienced by an indigenous population in a small island of Southern Chile in a context of neoliberal driven, fast changes.

Presentation long abstract

In the small island Apiao (southern Chile) the concept of caring is intrinsically imbricated with the concept of remembering, what I defined ‘active memory’. Caring for someone implies keeping them constantly present in your mind, despite the distance, through regular communication, offers of presents, visiting. These acts of care ensure that people are not forgotten and as such, are cared for. The same acts of care extend to more-than-humans: the dead who have turned into powerful souls, and the miraculous saints. These entities are remembered, cared for and honoured with regular ritual prayer meetings requiring vast expenses and collective celebrations.

Similarly, the islanders who leave their abode for a new life in town where they partially embrace a middle-class social landscape, keep their land, their homes and all its contents; they return regularly and make use of their space and their land, as well as of the portion of the coast near their dwellings, always generous with resources. The house and all its content is cared for and kept ready to welcome its former inhabitants; the land is regularly cultivated; its orchards keep producing. The beach keeps offering supplies unavailable in town. And yet leaving and returning requires effort, energy and care – that care that allows nourishing and maintaining relationships between people, people and non-human entities, and people and the territory.

This paper will explore the challenges of such regular crossings and the resilience of these islanders, and the role of caring and remembering in their lifestyle and choices.