Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies

Renowned feminist development scholar Wendy Harcourt offers the first incisive open access overview of how the lively feminist debates on care, in both minority and majority worlds, are crucial for critical development studies. Adopting an intentionally open and readable style to ensure its technical terms are understood, each chapter starts by narrating nonfictional, on-the-ground stories—stories selected from different places, peoples, and histories—in order to show how care is understood in feminist economic debates on key subjects such as social reproduction analysis; interspecies relations in posthumanism; environmental justice in feminist political ecology; and reciprocity and accountability in postdevelopment and decolonialism. In each chapter, these sketches are then fleshed out through a critical survey of influential thinkers and activists who adopt ecofeminist, feminist political ecology, critical indigenous studies, transition studies, postdevelopment, and decolonial approaches to development. This book—alongside the illustrations, vlogs, and social-media messaging that accompany it online— provides researchers, students, practitioners, and activists with the tools to explain why care is such a crucial concept for critical development discourse. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Erasmus University Rotterdam.

• Publication date: 11 December 2025
• Page count: 224
• Dimensions: Height 218 mm; Width 148 mm; Thickness 18 mm
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781350459601