Alevi communities, the largest religious minority in Turkey, gather in intimate settings where music, conversation, commensality, and storytelling cultivate what is known as muhabbet. Regarded as spaces of love, affection, and mutual care, muhabbet gatherings are typically organized spontaneously in both private and public settings, creating a profound sense of togetherness (tr. üç can, bir cem) among practitioners. While these gatherings are considered part of broader Alevi devotional practices and have often been discussed in relation to collective music-making, few studies critically examine the gendered labor that enables these temporary sanctuaries. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with Alevi practitioners in Turkey, I argue that women’s unevenly distributed practices of care—ranging from organizing domestic and social spaces to sustaining the acoustic conditions of gathering—constitute the very possibility of muhabbet. By attending to women and their reflections, the paper shows that this work is neither habitual nor taken for granted. Rather, women express a clear awareness of muhabbet’s ethical, religious, and social significance and describe their labor as a responsibility for sustaining community continuity amid state-sanctioned discrimination and sectarian violence. By centering women's care labor, I reframe muhabbet as a socio-religious and affective practice sustained through gendered labor rather than as a primarily performative expression of Alevi ritual life. In doing so, this paper contributes to feminist ethnomusicological debates on gendered labor, social reproduction, and the conditions under which musical and ritual life is sustained.

Recent scholarship in humanities has reexamined care ethics through ethnographic attention to lived realities of human and more-than-human worlds. This paper brings that conversation into a dialogue with the Chipko movement, a grassroots environmental movement in the 1970s Uttarakhand, India, in which villagers embraced trees to prevent state-led logging. Although many villages participated, its most widely recounted episode occurred in Reni village, where, in the absence of male villagers, women confronted forest officials and halted the felling of trees. During the movement, women sang songs of protest, and on the global platform, their voices and participation revealed a new applied practice of ecofeminism through care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2024 and 2025 in Reni, Lata, and Fagti villages, I analyze two encounters with women (singers) that reveal contrasting forms of care: one expressed through ethical obligation, the other through restraint amid social risk. Grounded in care ethics and feminist political ecology, I examine how women negotiate the decision to share Chipko songs as a form of care with a researcher from their same state. This paper assesses the consequences attached to it, thereby intensifying care and revealing it not as an automatic outcome of affect, but as a contingent practice structured by obligation, risk, memory, and relational tension. Songs within this context emerge as sonic archives highlighting gendered forms of labour during the movement. Based on these interactions, I argue that care in Chipko’s afterlife emerges as multidirectional and unevenly shaped by gendered labor, social reproduction, and vulnerability.

Following Mozambique’s contested 2024 election, nightly panelaço (pot-banging) protests in urban Maputo mobilized domestic sound-making as collective dissent that included people from all levels of society. At the height of the protests, a widely circulated image reimagined the Mozambican flag, replacing the AK-47 with a cooking pot. As a domestic tool largely associated with women’s work, the pot’s inclusion implicitly recognized seemingly invisible forms of labor as foundational to collective crisis response and community well-being. In this paper, I situate the panelaço protests alongside other forms of audible, gendered labor that enact care in times of crisis in Mozambique. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the rural district of Pebane, I examine how women’s dance associations performing tufo—a popular performance genre along the northern Muslim coast—have developed infrastructures of care that help sustain communities navigating prolonged instability, including war and recurring environmental disasters. Though tufo dancing is often (dis)regarded as a women’s leisure activity, I analyze dancers’ care activities, such as programming songs that lift audience morale, or planning and hosting celebratory events, as affective, organizational, and moral labor. Building on feminist theories of social reproduction and care labor, I argue that women’s care work creates connections during and after crises by maintaining social relations, producing collective feeling, and sustaining the networks that allow communities to endure and rebuild. I conclude by connecting the panelaço protests and tufo dancing as complementary sonic responses to crises, revealing how gendered care labor sustains communities beyond formal political and economic frameworks.

What happens when motherhood enters a profession defined by precarious employment, informal labor arrangements, and expectations of complete artistic devotion? This paper examines how women musicians in Bolivia negotiate reproductive labor within a musical field that assumes constant availability and stability. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and case studies with performer-mothers working in orchestras, conservatories, and freelance contexts, the study asks how caregiving reshapes artistic time, mobility, and professional opportunity in a society where institutional support is limited and gendered expectations of care persist. By treating motherhood as reproductive labor rather than a private life circumstance, this paper reveals how the practices sustaining musical production often depend on hidden infrastructures of care that remain invisible to institutional metrics of productivity. It also contributes to feminist ethnomusicological discussions of labor, temporality, and gender by demonstrating how social norms about care work intersect with professional musical cultures and challenge dominant models of the autonomous artist. This analysis has broader implications for understanding structural inequalities in musical labor and the gendered politics of artistic practice.