For a Caring Geography: Situated Solidarities and Feminist Care Ethics During and Beyond Crisis

Abstract

This paper calls for a caring geography that centres care and solidarity as interrelated, embodied practices rather than abstract concepts. Drawing on feminist ethics of care and scholarship on geographies of solidarity, I argue that care becomes politically transformative when coupled with solidarity, understood as negotiated mutuality across difference. Using an auto-ethnographic approach, I reflect on fieldwork conducted in Greece and the UK during intersecting crises of austerity and social reproduction. Through two vignettes—building trust in a women's migrant organisation and navigating the politics of compensating participants—I explore how everyday practices of care and solidarity emerge, are challenged, and can work upwards to reconfigure extractive research relationships. I situate research as a political process that generates new solidarities between researchers and participants under conditions of shared precarity. The paper contributes to debates on feminist methodologies and participatory research by showing how small, situated acts of care can become the groundwork for broader institutional and political transformation.