This article explores activist practices in a community kitchen based in the south of the United Kingdom with a dual focus on social and environmental justice. It draws on these practices to develop further feminist, and specifically ecofeminist, concepts of care ethics by arguing that embodiment is an essential element in lived relationships of care. Moreover, we show that these embodied components enable learning that can disrupt settled understandings of social and environmental injustices, including negotiating tensions relating to class and race. We demonstrate how this disruption combines with imaginative processes to stimulate critical political analysis of the relationship between local contexts of need and broader socio-political structures and power relations. Crucially, we work towards illuminating how care ethics and social practice combine to stimulate and inform political action. K E Y W O R D S feminist, ethics of care, ecofeminism, embodiment, activism, emergency food provisioning 1 | INTRODUCTION How can feminist theories of care ethics combine with social action to respond to unfolding social and environmental crises through bringing about transformative change? This question has long been posed by ecofeminism and, in this article, we demonstrate how embodied practices shift care expressed at the level of the personal into a wider political domain in line with the imperatives of ecofeminist care ethics. We argue that embodied, caring experiences can provide the moral resources for action to challenge the status quo and develop new ways of being in and with the world (Gibson Graham, 2011).

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The Gloucestershire Gateway Trust (GGT) is a social enterprise initiative in the Southwest England focused on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). This article describes a sixyear action research collaboration that has sought to support the GGT and its local non-profit organizational partners using a variety of action research methods including community surveys, Group Level Assessment, Future Creating Workshops and arts-based methods. The development of a community resident research team (CCRT) model has been a core aspect of this partnership that honors local knowledge and experience while providing training and employment opportunities to local residents. This initiative and the action research partnership described here offer an innovative approach for using AR to support effective community development that could be replicated in a variety of other contexts.

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