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In this paper we present a situated analysis of the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the life of small-scale farmers and agricultural laborers in India, Algeria, and Morocco. We draw on data collected through phone interviews since April 2020. Inspired by feminist scholars, we analyze our findings thinking with—and entangling—the concepts of intersectionality, resilience and care. We firstly document the material impacts of the lockdown measures, focusing particularly on the experiences of single women farmers and laborers, whose livelihood and well-being have been notably compromised. Secondly, we unfold how different agricultural actors have come up with inventive ways to respond to the unexpected situation which they are facing. In doing so, we highlight the importance of considering the multiple and entangled socionatural challenges, uncertainties, and marginalizations that different agricultural actors experience, as well as the transformative potential of their inventive practices, which are often motivated and informed by notions of care.

In this paper, we propose obliqueness as a feminist mode to analyse waterscapes, intersecting feminist political ecology with post-human feminist scholarship. Obliqueness means cultivating attentiveness to those things and events that at first sight appear inconsequential because they do not fit with official plans or predominant (power) structures. Through a methodological focus on the continuous making-of such structures – on acts of tinkering with institutions, ideas and technologies – obliqueness notices not just how structures are reproduced, but also helps draw attention to inconsistencies, divergences and transgressions – what we call overflows. Hence, our oblique analysis of a waterscape of a village in Maharashtra, India revealed overflows to two kinds of structuring: one stemming from the infrastructural lay-out of an irrigation system, and one stemming from intersecting hierarchical relations of caste and gender. These overflows point to possibilities for being and relating beyond those that can be contained in already identified social or planned material structures. In this way, an oblique analysis expands the theoretical and political space to co-enact more equitable human-water relations in Maharashtra, and elsewhere.

In this chapter, we share the insights of feminist political ecology (FPE) for degrowth, building from the debates on “caring communities for radical change” at the 8th International Degrowth Conference in August 2021. We discuss how FPE links to the principles of degrowth as an academic and activist movement and why it is necessary to take feminist political ecology perspectives on care and caring communities in resisting, questioning, and counteracting the structural racial, gender, and wider social inequalities that uphold and are perpetuated by growth-dependent economic systems. As we critically reflect on the experiences of paid versus unpaid, collectivised versus feminised care work, we argue that care is crucial to social and ecological reproduction in order to build just, sustainable and convivial societies.