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Paper short abstract

This intervention examines how a community-based socioenvironmental education program near the Sinú river delta operates as site of reworlding that seeks to counter dispossesive forces through a reclamation and reorganization of knowledge and knowledge practices.

Paper long abstract

In a coastal village near Colombia's Sinú river delta, a surf club for girls challenges gendered norms in relation to the sea. But the club isn't really about surfing. Nor is it really about gender. Rather, the surf club is part of a wider community-driven socioenvironmental education program, Sinumar, that centers knowledge and knowledge production as key to reversing dispossesive pressures. Multiple ruptures characterize the recent history of this popular but still off-the-beaten-path beachside tourist destination. Among them are transformations in the ecosystem resulting from climate change and human activity, the tensions and opportunities of a growing tourism economy, generational gaps resulting from the region's historical conflict dynamics, and a continued sense of rural marginalization that frames youths' future prospects. Local fisherfolk and educators alike speak of an unworlding associated with these pressures: the slow, attritional violence (Nixon 2011) of a disappearance of customs, of ecosystems, of cultural and intellectual traditions, of access to space and place, of ways of knowing. Driven by a relational and process-oriented territorial approach, Sinumar deploys classroom, embodied, outdoor, and revenue-generating strategies for bringing youth and adults into creative dialogue with these disappearances. This paper will discuss how Sinumar's methodology operates a practice of (re)worlding through an ongoing collective exercise of selectively reclaiming and discarding vernacular, scientific, embodied, and historical knowledges and knowledge practices, in an effort to create sustainable social, economic, and ecological conditions for the community and its youth's futures.