Caring for the world: Geography, religious cosmovision and encounters, Elizabeth Wilson's 'actionist' career, 1943-1990'

This paper focuses on the spatial imaginings of a pacifist, developmentalist humanitarian, and poly-activist who was engaged from the Second World War onwards with refugees, immigrants in the 1960s, development projects in the 1960s and 1970s, pacifism during the Vietnam war, and antinuclear campaigns of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Elizabeth Wilson presented the peculiarity of being immersed in developing a spiritual notion of care. Through her engagement with Buddhism, Zen, and Hinduism, as well as her pursuit of psychoanalytical collective unconscious based on the work of Carl Jung, Elizabeth Wilson offers an original perspective of what it meant to be a humanitarian at a crucial juncture in the 1960s. This paper will attempt to reconcile the specificity of her activism with the wider narrative of internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by paying attention to how she related her often fragile sense of self with her role as a carer connected to broader and deeper networks of inspirational (female) figures. While she denied being a feminist and preferred to describe herself as a human being (also highlighting a maternalist identity by repeatedly mentioning she was a ‘mother of four’), Elizabeth Wilson built friendships and ‘actionist’ (their word) networks of care that helped her ‘sustain’ her idealism and pursue her ‘journey’. Elizabeth Wilson undertook internationalist causes as a spiritual quest and a personal self-construction, and her writings, diaries, photographs, and rich personal archives enable us to approach the concept of care in the after-war as a central concern in the development of a new humanitarian consciousness.