by: Kayla Yurco
The pandemic arrived as I was writing, among other life and work pursuits, from my home in Virginia about the ethics of care related to the gendered nature of livestock management in southern Kenya. As my capacity to make space for writing unraveled, so too did my understanding of care in the unprecedented world that emerged: care for myself, care for my loved ones, care for my students and colleagues, and care for the communities I was writing about halfway across the world.
Care is central to my focus in several ways. One of my major projects over the last decade in Kenya aims to unveil the gendered nature of livestock management in pastoralist communities and demonstrate how collaborative or conflictual livestock caretaking activities influence gender roles. This work recognizes that the existing rich body of literature on human-livestock-environment interactions in sub-Saharan Africa has tended to focus primarily on herding activities in rangelands where livestock graze under the supervision of men. Pastoralist women’s caretaking roles at home have been more often overlooked, yet, as my research demonstrates, they are integral to decision-making about household economies.
The care work that pastoralist women do is so significant, I’ve found, that gendered intra-household relations, rather than grazing activities or household assets like herd size, determine food security and coping/adaptive strategies: namely, availability of milk resources for individuals within households. Moreover, gender relations within pastoralist households are co-produced through milking practices that emerge as women exercise their responsibilities to apportion milk (to hungry calves and hungry children, husbands, guests, and for occasional sales) and as men attempt to preside over these activities (implementing, subverting, or affirming rules and norms of use). Women are also the holders of ethnoveterinary knowledge: with twice daily milking activities, it is women who physically connect with and observe the health of cows in dynamic milking events. These are embodied moments of care that inform women’s difficult decisions about limited resources.
My findings align with efforts to expose the uncomfortable truth that deep-rooted patriarchal traditions ingrained in resource management practices in the global South obscure the importance of women’s labor. More uncomfortable is the truth that patriarchal traditions ingrained in academic discourse, theory, and methods also obscure the significance of women’s labor. A clear example is the historical and normative conceptual focus on the household as a unit of analysis in agrarian settings, a focus that has translated to limited availability of empirical, gender-disaggregated data from within households across the global South. This is true even as evidence mounts for how resource use, access, and management decisions are differentiated within households along gendered lines worldwide.
The challenge here, and now more than ever, is that in order to understand gendered, embodied moments of care and their significance to women’s lives, we need to follow Joni Seager’s call to “lift the roof off the household” (2014) and see what makes a household work. Collecting gender-disaggregated data necessitates iterative feminist methodologies, collaboration with empowered research participants, and thoughtful reflections on positionality; i.e., it requires care. Practically, it also requires time actually spent in households. It requires so much time to understand the mundane, the ups and downs of the everyday, and the quirks that make us human – that which we might eventually codify as intra-household dynamics – time that allows us to process data points as characteristic of the collaborations and conflicts we all have across the proverbial dinner table.
Until now, I’ve had the privilege to put my boots on the ground for a lot of time and often in my efforts to write about care. Now, due to the global pandemic, I have the privilege to wrestle with new notions of care from home via reflections I suspect are shared by contributors and readers of this blog. For instance: How can we keep showing up for those we are writing about but cannot be with? And how can we care for ourselves in this uncertain era so that we can keep doing social and environmental justice work that empowers women in the gender-agriculture nexus now, and later?
Lately, I’ve felt that a focus on care might help us communicate and position these personal-political overlaps in this unprecedented complexity of care needs. This is about confronting individual privileges inherent in admitting how challenging it is to work on these topics during this difficult time while continuing to forge forward anew. Honest reflections on the power of care – the vulnerability of needing, expressing, and giving it – as individuals might give us the means to keep offering it toward our local, national, and global communities in this extraordinary time. Embracing the dynamic nature of care at a variety of scales might help us keep harnessing it toward ally-ship, organizing, action, and all else that might be needed, especially to those experiencing heightened inequities in the agri-food system due to legacies of systemic marginalization, oppression, and violence.
Pre-pandemic, I didn’t imagine that these questions of care would become the centralizing focus of my day-to-day energies. But care looks really different to me now. Many days I try to hold space for care in discussions that pan out over text with the friends, colleagues, and research participants in Kenya who have made my career possible. COVID-19 has impacted their lives in ways I can only begin to understand from afar and has brought unprecedented challenges to their caretaking activities. Closer to home, a lot of my energy goes to holding space for local and community caretaking while asking difficult questions about my loved ones (e.g., is it care to visit my parents, or is it care to not visit them?). And with the fall semester looming, my work now includes regular readings on the ethics of care in trauma-informed pedagogy and focused preparation to encourage self-care practices for my students in, and outside of, the (virtual) classroom. It is less clear to me to what degree this work manifests as care for my students or as self-care.
What is clear to me is that there is so much care work to be done. I’m aiming to contribute to the complexity, in part, by holding an honest space to re-imagine and re-negotiate my sense of, capacity for, and commitment to care. I’m warmly looking to learn from others struggling and succeeding with the same.
Sources:
Seager, J. 2014. Background and Methodology for Gender Global Environmental Outlook. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme.
Kayla Yurco is an Assistant Professor of Geographic Science in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University. She is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University (Ph.D., Geography) and the University of Michigan (M.S., Natural Resources and Environment) and a former Graduate Fellow of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya. Her research and teaching center on the intersection of gender, environment, and development.