Love Ethics: When Cariño Becomes Action

What collaborative research with Indigenous Peoples teaches us about care, responsibility, and social change

Love is rarely treated as a serious research method. In universities and public institutions, it is often pushed into the private realm, as though care and feeling compromise objectivity. Yet research is never free of values. Every project begins with choices: whose questions matter, who is recognized as an expert, what counts as knowledge, who controls the process, and who benefits when the work is finished. A love ethics makes those choices visible and asks whether they promote the dignity, authority, and futures of the people involved.

The idea explored here grows from collaborative research with Indigenous Peoples in the Peruvian Amazon. In that work, the Spanish word cariño carried more meaning than a simple translation of love or affection. It referred to caring about the well-being of people and places. It also described a force capable of moving people from feeling to responsibility. Cariño was not a decoration added to an otherwise conventional project. It became an ethical foundation for deciding how relationships would be formed, how knowledge would be created, and how commitments would be fulfilled. 

Love is not only a feeling

A love ethics begins with an important distinction: caring is not the same as merely expressing good intentions. Cariño must be enacted and embodied. It becomes meaningful through what a person is willing to do, change, postpone, share, or protect for the well-being of others. In the research process, it appeared in daily interactions, in reminders about responsibilities, and in decisions to place community priorities ahead of institutional convenience.

This understanding matters because the language of care can easily become empty. Organizations may speak warmly about inclusion while retaining control over the questions, timelines, interpretation, and final products. Researchers may claim solidarity while treating people primarily as sources of information. Love ethics demands evidence in conduct. It asks whether affection has altered the distribution of power and whether intercultural respect shows up in the design and consequences of the work.

Community members also described cariño as a quality through which leaders could be assessed. To love one’s people was to be willing to serve them, including when leadership carried personal risks. Cariño had no monetary meaning; it was not a transaction or a service purchased in exchange for cooperation. It was like an engine catalyzing action for collective well-being. In this sense, love was both intimate and political: it connected personal commitment to the possibility of social change. 

Changing who is recognized as an expert

Conventional research often separates the person who knows from the person who is “studied.” The outside researcher arrives with credentials, defines the problem, gathers information, and later presents their interpretation as the accepted truth. Indigenous Peoples may be invited to participate, yet participation alone does not undo this hierarchy. A project can use collaborative language while still imposing an external reality.

Love ethics calls for a different relationship. One in which collaborators are the experts in their own realities, not as objects or subjects to be studied or passive participants. In our collaborative projects, Indigenous community members were co-researchers and helped shape the design, analysis, interpretation, and sharing of the results. Their knowledge, science, wisdom, languages, experiences, and aspirations were not supplementary material. They were central to the inquiry.

This shift changes the researcher’s role. Instead of directing every stage, the research team facilitates conditions in which people can articulate their own concerns and desirable futures. Asking replaces telling. Dialogue replaces extraction. The aim is not to gather voices and carry them away, but to create knowledge relationally, through doing and reflecting together. As one principle captured it, researchers must learn to sit alongside people rather than above them. 

Listening has an ethical rhythm

Love ethics also changes the pace of research. Institutional projects tend to privilege deadlines, standardized procedures, and the researcher’s calendar. Relationships follow another rhythm. Respect may require waiting, returning, holding several conversations, or accepting that research is not the priority during grief, crisis, celebration, ritual, or the maintenance of community relations.

In the Amazonian collaboration, flexibility was not a sign of weak planning. It was a practice of respect. Methods evolved in response to Indigenous agendas, spaces, languages, daily activities, and available time. People were offered different ways to express knowledge, including conversation, storytelling, drawing, singing, writing, and dancing. Individual and collective spaces were created, including gender-based sessions, and the team went to elders and people with disabilities rather than expecting everyone to come to a setting chosen for the researchers’ convenience.

Listening therefore meant more than remaining silent while another person spoke. It involved creating the conditions in which people could answer in their own ways, voices, and on their own time. It also meant recognizing when not to ask, when to leave space for private discussion, and when the original plan needed to change. Love ethics treats such responsiveness not as courtesy, but as part of the integrity of the knowledge being created.

Accountability lives in relationships

At the heart of this approach is relational accountability: the continuing examination of one’s responsibilities and whether they are actually being fulfilled. Accountability is not limited to signing a consent form or satisfying a university procedure. It extends across the relationship and requires transparency about motivations, assumptions, values, promises, and expected outcomes.

The research team practiced self-reflection, reflection among team members, and collective reflection with community knowledge holders and spokespersons. These were not abstract exercises. They helped the team identify biases, question its own conduct, adapt methods, and verify interpretations while the work was unfolding. Collaborators were able to express preferences and requests, and the team sought to accommodate them as fully as possible. Community collaborators also evaluated the work and validated the knowledge co-created.

This form of accountability becomes especially important where communities have experienced broken promises from outsiders. Love ethics cannot ask people to trust simply because a new project describes itself as participatory. Trust must be cultivated through consistency. Finishing the outcomes that communities prioritized, returning knowledge, respecting agreements, and remaining answerable when tensions arise are all ways that care becomes credible and love turns into action.

Feeling is a form of intelligence

A love-based approach challenges the assumption that reason is superior to feeling. This hierarchy is not neutral. When institutions treat emotion as inappropriate, they may dismiss an important source of moral understanding and political energy. Sentiments can reveal what people value, what harms them, what they are prepared to defend, and what kind of future they are trying to build.

Cariño served as the engine of the collaboration because it sustained attention to commitments even when the process became difficult. It helped connect admiration and empathy with concrete responsibility. It also encouraged the team to imagine common, desirable futures without pretending that everyone occupied the same social position or carried the same history.

This does not mean romanticizing Indigenous peoples, ignoring disagreement, or assuming that love eliminates unequal power. The research itself encountered tensions involving funding, logistics, gender, age, language, mobility, professional expectations, and ideas about who possessed expertise. Love ethics does not promise a conflict-free relationship. It offers a reason to face those tensions reflexively and to keep asking whether the process is becoming more respectful, more truthful, and less oppressive.

From principle to practice

For anyone working with communities, love ethics can be understood through a set of practical commitments. Begin by examining why the work is being undertaken and whose agenda it serves. Recognize community members as authorities over their own realities. Share meaningful control rather than inviting participation after the important decisions have already been made. Follow existing structures and cultural protocols. Adapt to people’s languages, places, responsibilities, and ways of expressing knowledge. Listen without forcing an immediate answer. Create opportunities for collaborators to review interpretations and judge the final work. Above all, make promises carefully and fulfil them.

These practices cannot be reduced to a universal checklist. The methodology co-developed with Amazonian Indigenous Peoples was shaped by specific Peoples, territories, relationships, experiences, and histories. Applying love ethics elsewhere would require the same willingness to learn from context rather than importing a ready-made model. The central question is not ‘How can we reproduce these methods?’ It is, ‘What would care, responsibility, and shared authority require in this relationship?’

A different measure of rigorous work

Love ethics asks us to reconsider what rigorous research looks like. Rigour is not diminished when researchers care about the people and places involved. It can be strengthened when care requires deeper reflection, more transparent relationships, shared interpretation, and accountability for consequences. Knowledge becomes more meaningful when those whose realities are represented can influence how it is produced and determine whether it reflects what they know.

Cariño begins as a sentiment, but it does not end there. It matures through relationships and becomes visible in service, patience, humility, courage, and completed commitments. Its ethical power lies precisely in this movement from feeling to action. In research—and in any institution that seeks to work with people rather than merely on them—love is not a soft alternative to responsibility. Properly enacted, it is what makes responsibility impossible to ignore.

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Source and acknowledgment

This public-facing essay draws exclusively on ideas developed collectively in: Vasquez-Fernandez, A. M., Hajjar, R., Shuñaqui Sangama, M. I., Sebastián Lizardo, R., Pérez Pinedo, M., Innes, J. L., & Kozak, R. A. (2017). “Co-creating and Decolonizing a Methodology Using Indigenist Approaches: Alliance with the Asheninka and Yine-Yami Peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 17(3), 720–749. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v17i3.1420. The structure and wording of this essay are original; the collective origins of the knowledge are retained and acknowledged.