The Ecologies of Reparation and Care: Repairing Broken Temporalities In a More-Than-Human World

Two intertwined problems anchor the session. First, broken temporalities: the compression of time and space under capitalism renders the slow, cyclical rhythms of ecosystems, soils, kinship, and intergenerational knowledge illegible and expendable. Repair therefore demands temporal reparation — resynchronizing transition with regenerative rather than extractive time. Second, care as repair beyond compensation: drawing on feminist political ecology and more-than-human ethics, the session asks how reparative practices — often carried by women, Indigenous, racialized, and subaltern communities — sustain life where states and markets fail, and how slavery, dispossession, and extraction can be understood as ecological as well as social violations requiring material, epistemic, and territorial redress.

We invite both conceptual and empirical contributions from across world regions, foregrounding situated knowledges and plural cosmologies of care, responsibility, and resistance without collapsing them into a new universalism. We welcome papers addressing four guiding questions: what is broken and in need of repair; who are the agents of reparation; what forms and mechanisms repair takes; and at what temporal and spatial scales it occurs. Themes may include: care work and social reproduction as ecological repair; everyday and “do-it-yourself” reparation; ecological debt and historical responsibility; reframing nature and the rights of more-than-human beings; and the contested temporalities of transition, governance, and justice.