Conundrums of Care

Wendy Harcourt’s latest offering is a deeply considered feminist and anticolonial reflection on care across a lifetime. With humility, grace and skill, she guides us through a series of deeply theoretical, carefully embodied, and clearly articulated ‘conundrums of care’. The book is a soulful contemplation of care that offers both a challenge and a balm for the thoughtful activist scholar. * Kelly Dombroski is Professor of Geography at Massey University of New Zealand, and author of Caring for life: a postdevelopment politics of hygiene. *Conundrums of Care is feminist political ecology at its best, based on a depatriarchalized self-reflexivity rarely found in the academy. It offers us an inspirational navigation chart for a pluriversal ethics and praxis of caring. Written in a compelling style, often relying on stories from the author’s rich archive of care practices, this superbly pedagogical book demonstrates why care needs to be repositioned as the pivotal principle of all we do –from raising babies to the living Earth, and from policy making and the economy to the academy itself. It explores the multiple conundrums at play in transitioning towards genuinely care-based societies, pushing us to consider the essential task of redesigning our current toxic loops of existence into healing loops that go on making life. * Arturo Escobar, author of Pluriversal Politics *Blending personal narrative with critical analysis, Conundrums of Care takes readers on an exuberant, feminist exploration of the “slippery” word care. A leading voice in critical development studies, Wendy Harcourt draws from decades of scholarship, teaching, and participation in international feminist coalitions to examine diverse theories and practices of care emerging from multiple social, cultural, and national contexts. In each chapter, through an engaging and accessible methodology integrating life storytelling, action-oriented vignettes, and interdisciplinary ecofeminist and anti-colonial analyses, we are introduced to a variety of “conundrums” (meanings, dilemmas, contradictions) that swirl around the concept of care. Importantly, each chapter provides us with many examples of people from across the world who are contesting the patriarchal, extractivist, and colonialist systems that exploit, restrain, or sever our vital connections to one another and to the Earth. Instead, in these stories we see creative approaches to radical care and social reproduction rooted in life-affirming practices of environmental justice, community solidarity, and multispecies interdependence. Conundrums of Care is essential reading for our troubled times. * Giovanna Di Chiro, Swarthmore College *

Wendy Harcourt is full Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the ISS/EUR The Netherlands.