Cultivating re-existence: women’s care work and political placemaking on the Myanmar-Thai river border

Across the world, conflict and capitalist dispossession inflict brutal violence on agricultural and resource-dependent populations. Drawing on ethnographic research among Indigenous Pgha k’nayaw communities displaced by military violence in Myanmar and living in Thailand, this article examines how caring for borrowed lands along the Salween River serves as an act of re-existence that emplaces people against entangled forms of crisis. Drawing on feminist theorisations of care, I argue that women's everyday labour, planting, weeding, and tending to borrowed lands creates the conditions for re-existence while simultaneously unsettling the Myanmar-Thai River border as a concrete line of territorial demarcation.