Embodiment, care and practice in a community kitchen

Abstract

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).

COVID‐19, ethics of care and feminist crisis management

“…Jordan’s (2020) work therefore highlights the importance of context within which narratives of care emerge and the complexities they provoke. Phillips and Willatt (2020, p. 214) also recognize the possibility for ‘regressive and paternalistic care practices to emerge in relation to the raced, classed and gendered structures’. Trust therefore matters to care, because without openness about vulnerability and an empathetic quality of understanding towards others, connection is eroded (Sevenhuijsen, 2003).…”

From the nice work to the hard work: “Troubling” community‐based CareMongering during the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Building on this literature, we focused on the tensions, conflicts, and differences (i.e., uncomfortable relations) that emerged when CareMongering practices shifted from care for and about to include care with . This helped us uncover the challenges of caring with different group members and communities through CareMongering – or, put differently, the “messy middle ground” of enacting care (Phillips & Willatt, 2019). Within this group, for example, different actors frequently had differing conceptions about what “good care” meant.…”

“…Through critical community care, those involved in CareMongering – and community care more broadly – can practice care for , about, and with communities, particularly those experiencing social exclusion in this (post)pandemic world. In making this argument, we build on and bring together scholarship on a feminist ethic of care (e.g., Bartos, 2018; Lopez, 2019; Phillips & Willatt, 2019; Raghuram, 2016), feminist responses to organizing and practicing care during the pandemic (e.g., Cozza et al., 2021; Gardiner & Fulfer, 2021; Miller, 2021; Vohra & Taneja, 2021), and the everyday experiences of organizers and members engaged in digital communities of care (e.g., Bakardjieva et al., 2018; Clark‐Parsons, 2018; Fletcher, 2019; Nuru & Arendt, 2019).…”

“…In so doing, we rethink the practices, actors, and politics involved in this virtually organized community care. We argue that within CareMongering there is a need for critical caring communities that recognize care as relational, political, and embodied work (e.g., Livnat & Braslavsky, 2020; MacLeavy, 2021; Miller, 2021; Phillips & Willatt, 2019). Through critical community care, those involved in CareMongering Facebook groups – and community care more broadly – can practice care that goes beyond caring only for or about community needs to also care with communities, particularly those experiencing social exclusion in this (post)pandemic world.…”

“…Lopez (2019) explains that centering an ethic of care – which requires care with – emphasizes relationality and demands recognition of privilege and power, which “opens the possibilities for a relational response to intersecting oppressions” (Lopez, 2019, p. 834). According to Mary Phillips and Alice Willatt (2019), such political action can occur as the “relational, embodied, emotional, and disruptive” characteristics of care intersect in practice (p. 213). Thus, we suggest that practicing care – specifically care with – is critical to the radical change needed in our (post)pandemic world.…”