Two crises to take care of: Body and Earth read through the Covid-19 pandemic and the ecological crisis

Abstract

This thesis is a theoretical analysis which seeks to read together the Covid-19 pandemic and the ecological crisis. Indeed the thesis tries to answer these questions: What can we learn from the Covid-19 crisis in view of the ecological emergency we are getting into? How can the central role that care has played during the pandemic become a tool to understand the ecological crisis? In order to draw the connection between the two crisis this work deepen three aspects emerging in the pandemic that are good starting points to better understand the ecological crisis: these three aspects are the global scale of the crisis, the devaluation of care and the individualization of responsibility. The first chapter aims to deconstruct the human homogeneous subject underlying the rhetoric around the global scale of both the Covid-19 and the ecological crises. The second chapter discusses the crucial role played by care during the pandemic showing how care can be a fruitful tool to approach also some of our problems with attending to the ecological crisis. The third chapter deconstructs the narrative of individual responsibility mobilized to deal with these crises and proposes an alternative imaginary to rethink care in times of crisis.