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<p>This paper examines how Indigenous and <i>campesina</i> women in the southern Ecuadorian Andes mobilize agroecology as a form of territorial defense against large-scale metal mining. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2023 and 2024 with women participating in agroecology schools (<i>escuelitas</i>), we develop the concept of ‘women’s plot-labor’ to describe women’s productive, reproductive, and affective agroecological labor practices. Building upon scholarship on plantation-plot dialectics, decolonial feminists, and feminist political economy, we argue that women’s plot-labor comprises a form of “commoning” rooted in Andean notions of the <i>minga</i> (reciprocal labor exchange) that produces relations of political, economic, and affective solidarity that open emancipatory futures. Our ethnographic research illustrates how labor practices that enact territorial defense are cultivated in <i>chakras</i> (provision plots), patios, kitchens, and bingo table—places where women gather, talk, organize, and create and imagine alternative lifeways. The paper highlights the plurality of ‘commoning’ practices such as seed exchange, mutual feeding, healing, and collective labor. Far from being solely a technical or economic alternative, we suggest that expansive agroecological practices based upon ‘commoning’ illuminate the transformative potential of women’s plot-labor to contest extractive economies and remake social and ecological relations.</p>

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Women’s plot-labor: commoning against extractivism and the cultivation of emancipatory futures in Ecuador

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月1日

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  • Kirsten Francescone,
  • Teresa A. Velásquez

摘要

This paper examines how Indigenous and campesina women in the southern Ecuadorian Andes mobilize agroecology as a form of territorial defense against large-scale metal mining. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2023 and 2024 with women participating in agroecology schools (escuelitas), we develop the concept of ‘women’s plot-labor’ to describe women’s productive, reproductive, and affective agroecological labor practices. Building upon scholarship on plantation-plot dialectics, decolonial feminists, and feminist political economy, we argue that women’s plot-labor comprises a form of “commoning” rooted in Andean notions of the minga (reciprocal labor exchange) that produces relations of political, economic, and affective solidarity that open emancipatory futures. Our ethnographic research illustrates how labor practices that enact territorial defense are cultivated in chakras (provision plots), patios, kitchens, and bingo table—places where women gather, talk, organize, and create and imagine alternative lifeways. The paper highlights the plurality of ‘commoning’ practices such as seed exchange, mutual feeding, healing, and collective labor. Far from being solely a technical or economic alternative, we suggest that expansive agroecological practices based upon ‘commoning’ illuminate the transformative potential of women’s plot-labor to contest extractive economies and remake social and ecological relations.