Care and world-making in times of despair

Abstract

Images of ecological collapse, starvation, and genocide spill into my phone screen, often causing despair. Yet amid a blanket of destruction, despair, and apathy that fill my social media, I am also aware that people sustain life by caring for one another and initiating repairs of our fractured world. This essay reflects on such practices of care, repair, and world-making by turning to my field site in McLeod Ganj, northern India, where I conduct ethnographic research on multispecies relations. Through attention to local animal caregivers’ everyday efforts of feeding, tending, and living with street animals, I argue that they rearticulate our understanding of ourselves, the nonhuman world, and our inevitable entanglements. Written during a time when it became increasingly difficult to separate my fieldwork from global violence and destruction unfolding elsewhere, this essay is an effort to think about and practice care and hope in an interdependent world.