Emancipatory Feminist Economics (EFE) can be understood as an emerging theoretical and political field where diverse disciplines converge. It arose in Latin America as a response to and alternative for the exacerbated attacks of neoliberalism on life. The deepening of these policies goes hand in hand with an accentuation of patriarchal logics, insofar as government policies disregard their responsibilities regarding the reproduction of life, leaving women to bear the brunt of these challenges.

Currently, the Covid-19 pandemic has deepened existing crises, making them more visible: food, care, public services, ecological collapse, economic and financial; all within a context of enormous inequalities. The situation is well summarized in the slogan: "it's not a crisis, it's the system" (Carrasco, 2021).

Feminist economics in the region denounces the fact that crises disproportionately affect women because they intensify unpaid work to meet family and community needs. In 2020, ECLAC recorded an 18-year setback in women's labor force participation rate, registering 46% compared to 69% for men. By 2022, women had not recovered the level of labor force participation they had in 2019 and remained overrepresented among the poorest segments of the population.

Despite the above, women play a leading role in generating income to support households, whether as sole providers or as "invisible" providers. This income is obtained through precarious employment and/or within informal, self-managed, and informal economies. Consequently, they are extremely vulnerable to crises; their economic activities are the first to suffer during adverse economic cycles.

These inequalities are exacerbated for racialized women. Poverty rates in single-parent households headed by Afro-descendant women are approximately double those of households headed by non-Afro-descendant women in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, and triple in Uruguay (ECLAC, 2020). Likewise, their labor market integration faces the ethnic and racial segmentation that characterizes the labor market. Even for those with higher levels of education, there is a marked difference in labor income compared to non-racialized women. "In the case of Afro-descendant women with 13 or more years of schooling, they receive an hourly wage equivalent to 57% of that received by non-Afro-descendant men with the same educational level, while non-Afro-descendant women receive 76% of the income earned by non-Afro-descendant men" (ECLAC, 2020).

In the context of systemic crisis, women manage the daily reproduction of life through the overexploitation of their time and labor. While we can affirm that this is a global reality, affecting the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region equally, its specific manifestations in different countries and regions vary depending on multiple factors. And its impacts on diverse social groups are highly unequal, depending on the interconnected oppressions that define their position.

In Mesoamerica, Torres (2021) highlights how women's organizations from popular and feminist sectors have seen their organizational fabric tested, in terms of demonstrating their capacity to sustain women's lives and projects, and their political relevance, whether through self-management or political influence within the state. Both dimensions have been profoundly impacted by the pandemic. First, because the pandemic has revealed that members of women's organizations—especially those at the local level—were barely above the poverty line. And with this pandemic, they have fallen below it. We can affirm that the organizational fabric of women in Mesoamerica is among the sectors most affected by the pandemic.

The implications of this crisis on women's lives extend over time within an economic framework marked by intense economic re-primarization that reinforces the extractivist model. The production of commodities destined for external markets, the exploitation of natural resources, the increase in public debt, and policies of labor market deregulation and tax exemptions—under the pretext of attracting capital to alleviate the crisis—have in their counterpart in the territories the militarization of daily life, the persecution of individuals and groups defending Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, and working-class territories, and the undermining of the conditions for building the commons. This advance sustains the economies of death that exacerbate the concentration of land and income and create new zones of exclusion and sacrifice (Quiroga, Rincón 2021).

Faced with the intensification of these processes, the EFE (Economic Feminist Front) prioritizes the care of all expressions of life (human and non-human), breaking with anthropocentric logics and the separation between nature and culture. From this perspective, it argues that it is not only about caring for nature, but also about questioning how the relational ontologies of the peoples who inhabit these territories challenge our understanding of the economic. This allows us to envision other ways of understanding the challenges posed by a feminist economy that enables forms of resistance while also offering alternatives to overcome the region's problems.

The notion of body-territory, as articulated in the region by feminist movements, links the challenge to the various oppressions women face and, at the same time, presents one of the most vital forces in the defense of life and in the theoretical renewal of feminist economics as a transdisciplinary field capable of confronting the various wars against women being waged in the region. The gendered lessons we built together and their exemplary strength as women have been the foundation for the political work that Mamá Maquín has subsequently carried out in Guatemala, which, beyond the Peace Accords, is framed within the construction of a society free from violence, racism, and inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity. From their bodies-territories subordinated and colonized by the capitalist patriarchal system, the women of Mamá Maquín have projected their work as a decolonizing action both personally and socially and together with other social organizations of women and mixed, they fight in defense of their lands and territories currently strongly threatened by global extractivism, which with the acquiescence of the government intends to expand investments in the construction of dams, hydroelectric plants and mining exploitation? (Olivera, 2019).

The EFE (Economic and Financial Economy) is situated within the context of the civilizational crisis and offers a critique of the economic order established by capital, the history of coloniality, and the way in which patriarchy manifests itself in these contexts. The alternatives we propose stem from recognizing existing practices in the region that demonstrate how women are protagonists in constructing a plurality of economic forms that center life and constitute alternatives that limit economies of death.

In a context of multidimensional crisis, such as the one mentioned in the previous section, the existence and functioning of a working group dedicated to enriching the field of Feminist Economics and critical thinking in general with interdisciplinary and multi-situated approaches in different spaces of knowledge production and political practice is relevant.

Since 2017, the group's work has been consolidating a collective production strengthened by collaborative work in the production of knowledge about the Latin American economy and social reality. This is achieved through the contribution of epistemological frameworks, concepts, and methodologies from various disciplines, and with a political stance grounded in feminism. Under these conditions, the group proposes a particular way of understanding problems and relating to the actors involved in their resolution. This approach was key in the context of COVID-19 for surveying the situation of racialized women during the pandemic. The aim was to highlight the shortcomings of public policies implemented in the region, while also showcasing the strategies deployed by women's networks and their proposals for economic reconstruction in their territories.

The contributions of emancipatory feminist economics thus enrich and diversify CLACSO's intellectual output and, more broadly, strengthen social and critical thought in Latin America and the Caribbean. This contribution is realized in the activities organized by the group, as well as in the activities carried out by its members within the framework of their academic and activist work.

In the social sphere, this working group considers it essential to coordinate and cooperate with diverse women's and feminist groups and organizations that are leading the struggles for the defense of life in our continent (Calderón, Olivera, and Arellano, 2021). One of the ways we will address this connection during this period is by paying attention to the processes of racialization stemming from coloniality present in the region (Dobrée and Quiroga, 2019). Discussions surrounding the lived experiences of racialized women are approached by recognizing the centrality of their perspectives in dialogue with the academic and grassroots work carried out by various members of the Working Group, thus strengthening the dialogue among a multiplicity of actors and promoting interpretations that account for the complexity of social and historical processes. It is important to note that the EFE Working Group includes prominent figures from academia, social organizations, Afro-descendant and Indigenous organizations, and gender and sexual minorities, representing the diverse geographical areas of the region. In forming the Working Group, we are committed to a diversity of perspectives to influence the truly democratic formulation of public policies and to address the challenges posed by the plurality of economies that sustain life on the continent.

In these areas, we have been framing the crisis not as a problem of growth but as a crisis of reproduction, exacerbated by the capital-life contradiction articulated from feminist, social, popular, and community-based economic perspectives. The Working Group also analyzes how new forms of accumulation are emerging that further precarize working conditions and the consequences that the expansion of these practices has for the care and sustainability of life (Gil, 2011; Gutiérrez and Navarro, 2018; Troya, 2021; Faria, Nobre, and Moreno, 2021).

In this new cycle we consider it important to continue producing situated knowledge to account for the dimensions intertwined in the crisis of reproduction and the multiplicity of strategies that are invented to sustain life (Carrasco, 2020, Quiroga, 2009, 2020; Soto et al 2020; Navarro and Linsalata, 2014; Pérez and Cornejo 2022).

In that sense, we believe that research and action committed to transformation processes go hand in hand; this interrelation will be the subject of a new publication with various collaborations from members of the Working Group, as indicated in the work schedule.

Disseminating our work through communication products to enrich public debate, generating audiovisuals and content for social networks is one of the new approaches with the aim of contributing to the dissemination of a critical view of economics among younger generations of social scientists and activists.

This Working Group seeks to: (1) Advance the formulation of territorialized theoretical and methodological frameworks for Community-Based Economics (CBEs) that avoid replicating North-centric, urban-centric, anthropocentric, heteronormative, and ethnocentric biases. (2) Analyze current economic processes in territories from a CBE framework. (3) Strengthen connections between academia and social or community organizations that are developing thought and action from a CBE approach or one close to it. (4) Identify and disseminate the diversity of existing but dispersed and/or little-known CBE knowledge, proposals, and experiences (theoretical-analytical, political action, and public policy advocacy). (5) Strengthen CBE training processes within universities and in spaces that serve as a link between universities and social movements.

Finally, all the knowledge and practices produced by the EFE Working Group aim to enrich the intellectual life of the region through ongoing internal reflection and collaborative work with networks and actors in the territory. It also seeks to have a greater impact on the development of an economic revitalization agenda that places the struggles for the commons, the practices of popular, social, and solidarity economies, and the experiences of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples defending their territories at the heart of its objectives. In short, it aims to confront the civilizational crisis with a feminist and emancipatory perspective on the economy.