June 24, 2026

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Gaia Giuliani e Teresa Cunha

This doctoral thesis examines ecofeminist practices and propositions concerning food production by women in peasant and family agriculture across two distinct territorial contexts: the Serra do Montemuro, Portugal, and the Baixo Sul region of Bahia, Brazil. While participants did not explicitly employ the term ecofeminism, their narratives articulated principles and practices consistent with ecofeminist thought, understood here as a vital interconnectivity between species and nature, and as a political stance against structures of domination that perpetuate contemporary wars against people and the Earth/land - namely patriarchy, modern Western colonialism, racism, and socioeconomical extractivist capitalism. Employing a qualitative, participatory, and feminist research design, with a narrative-centred approach, I analysed the intersections among gender, race, class, ecosociogeographic conditions, and economic systems; forms of resistance and individual-collective alternatives; the impacts of patriarchal culture on women's lives and their food production; and pedagogies and epistemologies that counter the prevailing agro-technological-industrial paradigm. The integrated theoretical-empirical analysis demonstrates that the current neoliberal socioeconomic order reproduces what may be termed the "colonial-capitalistic regime", a global system underpinning "eco-apartheid" that detrimentally impacts human and non-human communities, ecosystems, and the Earth/land. Agroecological initiatives led by women - frequently in alliance with organisations and movements such as Brazil's Rural Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and La Via Campesina International - emerge as embodiments of food sovereignty and autonomy. Participants' accounts reveal micropolitics of care with and for the land/Earth, fostering biosocial bonds, reaffirming the principles of living well, and contesting the extractive, predatory logic of capital. Findings indicate that food sovereignty encompasses far more than nutritional adequacy, extending to relational modes of production and commercialisation grounded in cooperative and ecological practices with and in the governance, regeneration, re/production, and biosocial preservation of life. The trajectories of theoretical and empirical research further suggest that popular education in and for rural territories, when combined with participatory and contextually responsive public policies, can facilitate the reinvention of ways of being, existing, and knowing through plural rationalities that sustain the coexistence and continuity of our common life.

Keywods: food production by women in peasant and family agriculture; ecofeminism; care-for-life micropolitics; agroecology.