Talk ‘Telling/counting everyday life in a subsistence perspective.
Ethnography of the household of radical ecologists’
30 October 2026, 5.00pm
Oxford Department of International Development
Geneviève Pruvost (CNRS)
What are the boundaries of what we call “household”/“maisonnée”? Tools, living matters, animals, plants, permanent reevaluation of their interactions, caring about distributing the right tasks and having a transgender concern of regeneration of living matters and objects require a collective art of crafting a very precise assemblage. Alternative everyday life can be studied from an ecofeminist perspective and with the method of ethnocountability: telling a story minute by minute, counting material life in zooming in so many details for entanglements to become visible, tangible in a mass consumption society where subsistence is marginalized and though reappropriated by ecological communities.
Geneviève Pruvost is a sociologist and ethnographer specialized in work, gender, ecofeminism, eco-lifestyles and activism. She is a research director at the CNRS (Paris-EHESS-CEMS) and has a permaculture degree. She works on ecological alternatives modes of life and inhabitance in rural areas, eco-construction, neo-peasantry, alternative birth and environmental struggles. She has published a book on subsistence and ecofeminism (Quotidien politique. Féminisme, écologie et subsistence, La Découverte, 2021) and on the economy of everyday life of baker-farmers who live in a yurta (La subsistance au quotidien, La Découverte, 2024). Her last book is on the fight for earthern construction against concrete with a gender and decolonial perspective (Avec la terre. Construire, habiter danser, Seuil, 2026).
