Nurturing the (re)Existence: Care, Women, and the Politics of Collective Mobilization in Urban Colombia

This paper examines how women use and make sense of cooking as a counter-strategy to challenge violence and multiple forms of oppression in the context of a violent and (post)colonial city. Building on feminist perspectives, nascent strands of literature in peace and conflict studies and urban politics draw attention to the crucial role of care in remaking the world amid contexts of war, crisis, and violence. Drawing on this approach, this paper foregrounds the role of care as a way of enacting political agency by marginalised women, as well as its importance both in sustaining massive protests and as a form of everyday resistance. The study examines protests and social mobilisation in the Colombian city of Cali, in the context of the massive national wave of protests in 2021 and its aftermath. It explores the ways in which practices linked to food (specifically, community-based cooking pots) constituted an element of social cohesion, organisation and mobilisation. Cooking as a form of political participation did not cease with the end of the protests. On the contrary, it became a key component in the repertoire of collective action of the social movements in the city. The experience of cooking during the strike represents a transformative event for the political agency and identity of the women who were engage with it. The methodological approach is based on collaborative ethnography and knowledge co-production. The analysis centres knowledge grounded in the material world and the bodily experience, that is, embodied knowledge. Examining the role of cooking as a form of political agency and everyday resistance, as well as a means of co-creating new worlds, through the lens of decolonial and feminist perspectives offers new insights into the gendered, impactful and temporal dimensions of care, collective action and urban politics.