CApE Talks. Care, ecological crisis and the dead ends of modernization
Talk by Manuela Zechner
What is care and what might it mean to care as we’d like to, in times of social and ecological crisis? Our current socio-ecological care impasse challenges us to reclaim relations of interdependence as well as autonomy, and to resist late liberal ideologies that center on profit and self-interest. How can we overcome the apparent opposition between care and self-interest, and with it a host of other binaries of neoliberal capitalist modernity: such as past vs future, countryside vs city, reproduction vs production, genealogy vs autology?
This talk is about how we may strengthen earthcare subjectivities - within, against, and beyond the mentioned binaries. Thinking alongside Joan Tronto, Stefania Barca, and Elizabeth Povinelli, with notions of care, earthcare labour, and a critique of late liberalism, this presentation will take some examples from peasant and agroecological practices and struggles. Beyond dominant narratives, it points to the ways in which peasants and farmers are not just victims of modernization but also a force of resistance, as part of agroecological movements that can refute separations between genealogy and autology, between past and future, between urban and rural, and show how care and commons go together beyond the Anthropocene.
