Rest as Resistance : Feminist Wellbeing in Crises

Abstract

Rest as Resistance: Feminist Wellbeing in Crisis is a 30-month initiative designed to strengthen the emotional and mental resilience of feminist human rights defenders (FHRDs) in Pakistan, particularly those navigating climate-induced disasters, political conflict, and systemic violence. This project emerges from extensive grassroots consultations that revealed an urgent, unmet need: spaces for healing that are feminist, trauma-informed, community-rooted, and politically conscious.

The project follows a phased approach, beginning with healing circles to build trust and emotional grounding, followed by a residential Feminist Wellbeing Institute for 20 selected activists. These spaces will center rest, care, trauma processing, and collective meaning-making. Together, participants will co-create an open-access Feminist Care and Wellbeing Toolkit and an advocacy brief, positioning care not as a secondary support service, but as political infrastructure necessary for sustainable feminist resistance.

Informed by frameworks such as feminist ethics of care, healing justice, pluriversal knowledge systems, and multidirectional memory, the project challenges dominant crisis-response models that invisibilize the emotional labor of activists. It seeks to disrupt cycles of burnout, reclaim healing as a feminist act, and advocate for the integration of care into humanitarian, climate, and gender justice ecosystems.

This project is both an intervention and an invitation to reimagine activism as a space where care and resistance are not opposites, but intertwined practices of survival and liberation.