Seminar: “The politics of care, commons and collective Ecology” by Manuela Zechner

Title: “The politics of care, commons and collective Ecology”

 

Speaker: Manuela Zechner, Aristotle University Thessaloniki

Date: Wednesday, January 22nd 2020

Time: 12.30h

Place: Room Z/022 - Z/023 ICTA-UAB

 

In this session, which will combine a presentation and a workshop, visiting researcher Manuela Zechner will share some conceptual and methodological tools for researching care, commons and matters of ecology. She will talk about the ways in which theories of care may open onto new ways of understanding ecological impasses, particularly in their practical and subjective dimension; and she will share her (auto-)ethnographic work on childcare commons in Poble Sec, Barcelona. All this will serve to ground a care-network mapping exercise that can hopefully be useful for both individual and collective research endeavours in political ecology. The aim of this session is to share, experiment and discuss collectively, and it is open to activists, students and researchers at all levels.

Manuela Zechner is currently a postdoc at the ERC-funded Heteropolitics project (based at Aristotle University Thessaloniki), researching commons in southern Europe; since 2017 she’s been working on childcare commons and the micropolitics of municipalism, in Barcelona. She did her PhD at Queen Mary University London, on the politics of care in precarity-organizing, working with arts-based methods such as the future archive. Coming from arts- and feminism- based militant research, as well as social movement studies and political theory, Manuela has recently been engaging with political ecology and hopes to sharpen and broaden her approach at ICTA, learning with the WEGO project on feminist political ecology.