"We can make other ways": the temporalities of care in feminist and abolitionist activism

This thesis investigates the temporalities of care in feminist political organising, with a focus on abolitionist, anti-capitalist, and anti-border feminist activism. Through qualitative research I explore the ways care (as a practice, politics, ethic, and affect) shapes feminist activists' experiences of both lived and imagined time. The thesis draws on fourteen qualitative interviews with feminist political organisers in the U.K; auto-ethnographic reflections; visual analysis of photos taken by my participants to reflect presents and futures of care; and theoretical and literary reflections on the dynamics of care. The participants in this work agitate and organise through a variety of groups and practices - local community work, internationalist feminist movements, union organising, anti-austerity direct action groups, and detention centre visitations - but are broadly involved in feminist organising orientated towards anti-capitalist and anti-carceral futures. I employ a diffracted and caring/careful methodological approach, which draws on histories of scholar-activism, participatory research methods, and queer feminist modes of inquiry. Insofar as this work examines the complex and ambivalent temporalities of care, it does so speculatively, holding on to the not yet temporality of revolutionary futurity through a hopeful epistemology. Genealogies of feminist, anti-racist, decolonial, queer and abolitionist theory and activism form the backbone of my analysis. Broadly, the interpretive framework of the thesis brings together two key theoretical orientations: firstly, anti-racial capitalist and Marxist theories of time and temporality and, secondly, feminist, and queer theorisations of the politics and ethics of care as a practice of resistance and transformation.

Linking to my own experiences organising in feminist and anti-border movements in the U.K and Europe, my empirical chapters are interspersed with speculative interludes drawing on 'the oceanic' as a generative site and metaphor for this thesis. I work with oceanic poetry, fiction, music, psychosocial theory, historical and sociological studies to frame and theorise the temporalities, ambivalences, and entanglements of care. I employ a framework of power-chronography to argue that care is a practice which both takes and makes time, often implicated in slow and everyday temporalities which forms a strategy of spatio-temporal struggle for the possibility of shared time in a world where people are differentially temporally valued and produced. Through exploring my participants' experiences of suspended and failed care, I examine care as an ambivalent practice which is both shaped by and attempts to transform 'crisis-ordinariness' as a genre of contemporary lived time. Although care often frustrated and failed my participants, it nonetheless endured as a practice and an orientation for many of them in their political organising, and I follow their orientations to explore the not yet horizon as a crucial aspect of care as a revolutionary politics. Care, this thesis argues, is a vulnerable practice of concrete utopia - a critical and ambivalent politics of hope rooted in everyday struggle and work to survive.