Reparative Resistance: Care, Embodiment, and Relational Practices in Climate Justice Organising

Reparative Resistance: Care, Embodiment, and Relational Practices in Climate Justice Organising: In this paper I argue that reparative practices—care work, intentional embodied practices, and the cultivation of responsive relationality—are essential infrastructures of resistance, rather than auxiliary or “nice-to-have” dimensions of movement life. My research is grounded in multi sited ethnography at climate camps in Europe and participatory workshops conducted between 2022 and 2026, where I worked alongside activists using embodied practices, social justice somatics, creative movement, and collective reflection. These embodied methods enabled me to witness how the climate crisis, political inaction, and increasing repression register in and through activists’ bodies as exhaustion, overwhelm, paralysis, grief, and relational strain. I understand these states not as individual weaknesses but as embodied effects of structural violence, fossil fuel capitalism, and tightening authoritarianism. My fieldwork shows that reparative practices, such as collective care, sharing of domestic labour, consent based organising, grounding and regulation techniques, debrief circles, conflict mediation tools, menstrual and accessibility infrastructures, and mutual aid arrangements, play a crucial role in sustaining long term engagement. They help (climate justice) movements align their values with their everyday organising, foster empathetic and accountable relations, and build forms of internal resilience that enable resistance to continue under pressure. At the same time, I attend to the ruptures, exclusions, and tensions that surface when care falters, becomes unevenly distributed, or is deprioritised in moments of urgency. Rather than viewing these ruptures as failures, I understand them as reflective openings through which movements can negotiate power, address harm, and redistribute unacknowledged labour. My contribution to Resistance Studies is twofold. Empirically, I document how embodied and relational practices strengthen movements’ capacities to withstand repression, fragmentation, and activist burnout. Methodologically, I offer an approach that treats the body not only as an object of inquiry but as a site of political knowledge and collective repair—a feminist commitment to knowing with and not merely about movements. I argue that attending to embodied ways of knowing is vital for understanding how activists navigate political life in times of uncertainty, ecological collapse, and resurgent authoritarianism. These insights illuminate not only how crisis is lived, but also how reparative practices generate resources for resilience, solidarity, and transformative organising.