A femin… manifesto: Academic ecologies of care and cure during a global health pandemic

This article is a femin… manifesto for supporting and encouraging academic ecologies of care and cure: it is a collaborative assemblage created by six academics—laborers, white, native American, European, Caucasian, cisgender, neurodivergent, bisexual, gay, and… and… and…—who wrote these reflections during the pandemic events that affected their lives. The cultural artifact, the femin… manifesto, is organized around nine theses, each of which tries to highlight the multiplicity of cares and genders, the challenges, the productive vitality, and the enforced slowness experienced both during lockdown and after it. The paper uses different forms/styles—academic writing, pictures, poems, first-person narratives—which nurture the flow of the presentation of the nine theses. Each thesis ends with a call for action. The femin… manifesto is a performative text which, while opposing the constraints of the COVID-19 emergency, also sees the potential the event offers for caring and curing - both life and our academic lives. Femin… manifesto renders explicit the undecidability of cares and cures and is a call to unite with the aim of resisting the inequalities and vulnerabilities which COVID-19 has exacerbated.