Description
This paper explores how feminist ethics of care can reshape research practices in the South Caucasus —a region deeply marked by overlapping histories of empire, socialism, nationalism, and neoliberal transition. Drawing on fieldwork and activist-research experiences across Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, I reflect on how power and care are negotiated within everyday encounters of knowledge production. I argue that care, understood as both affective and epistemic labour, offers a way to resist extractive and hierarchical research traditions, including the contemporary dynamics of data colonialism, where local knowledge and experiences are turned into resources for global academic consumption.
Through a feminist-decolonial lens, the paper examines how researchers from semi-peripheral contexts navigate tensions between institutional demands, ethical commitments, and local responsibilities. It highlights the emotional and relational work of field research where “good intentions” are not enough to confront asymmetries of access and representation. By reimagining the field not as a site of data extraction but as a shared, contingent space of co-labour, the paper invites a broader conversation about what ethical and cooperative research can look like under conditions of geopolitical and epistemic inequality.
Ultimately, it argues that care is not only an ethical stance but a political practice which can unsettle the logics of data extractivism and open possibilities for decolonizing knowledge production in and about the South Caucasus.
