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Anthropology and Environment Society
Oral Presentation Session
Samantha King
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In recent years, the coalescing crises of the Anthropocene have inspired major shifts in global development thinking that have expanded the focus of aid interventions beyond economic parameters to address a wide array of social and ecological concerns. In conjunction, rural women have emerged as key targets of development support. This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dominica since 2012 to examine this gendered process of agrarian change. Amidst the gradual decline of commercial agriculture and the punctuated ruination of catastrophic storms, global narratives and local experiences of crisis have been mobilized by women to enact alternative forms of development that are mediated by regenerative ecological cycles and rhythms of village and family life. While these complex temporalities of crisis and care arise through the immense challenges presented by our current epoch, they also reveal the potential to open cracks within the global order that can be leveraged to promote a more progressive politics for living in the aftermath.