Community care infrastructures: an analytical proposal based on solidarity kitchens during the floods in Rio Grande do Sul

Abstract

This paper proposes the concept of community care infrastructure as an analytical category that brings together studies of care, social reproduction, and Latin American feminist political ecology. The term “community care infrastructures” refers to collective, territorially rooted sociomaterial arrangements that, with a certain degree of durability and scale, organize the provision of care by combining material resources, solidarity networks, organizational capacities, and reproductive labor. To advance this debate, the empirical focus of this study is on solidarity kitchens organized by women in the Porto Alegre Metropolitan Region during the major floods that struck the state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2024, a context of multiple crises in which neither the state nor the market provided satisfactory conditions for the reproduction of life. The qualitative research was conducted between December 2025 and April 2026. The question for debate is: to what extent does this category allow us to analyze practices that are simultaneously material responses to the crisis, alternative forms of economic organization, and spaces for politicizing inequalities of gender, class, and race?