Presentation short abstract

This paper unsettles predominant stories of political ecology by arguing that Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, traditional, and territorial communities throughout Latin America have generated transformative political ecologies through embodied and emplaced collective socialecological practices.

Presentation long abstract

This paper centers the contributions of Latin American political ecology—a rich, dynamic, and diverse tradition of critical practices and scholarship often overlooked in broader debates due to the geopolitics of knowledge production. Drawing on Latin American political ecology scholarship in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, we unsettle predominate stories of political ecology in Anglophone scholarship. We build from key academic and activist works to bridge the stories of political ecology in, of, and from Latin America with theories derived from studies about the region. Doing so, we foreground insights emergent from lived struggles and forms of collective action as we have experienced them in our lives, activism, and work across the Américas.

Indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant, traditional, and territorial communities throughout Latin America have generated transformative praxis through theory-informed, embodied, and emplaced collective socialecological practices of territorio, buen vivir, socioambientalismo, and other actions that shape political ecology theory rather than being mere fodder for empirical cases. This is clear in works on the "politics of difference" and "environmental rationalities" that arise from movements, or theories from epistemic borderlands where academic knowledge meets territorial resistance.

Latin American political ecologies emerge not only from centuries of resistance by quilombolas, Indigenous peoples, and campesinos to land dispossession, enriched by feminist and decolonial perspectives articulating cuerpo-territorio connections and beyond-human justice, but from how these plural perspectives teach us about existence, collective solidarities, and territories of life. Socialecological movements across the region produce powerful stories of ecología política as theory-in-motion that foregrounds justice, relationality, and pluriversal futures.

Presentation short abstract

This communication examines environmental conflicts in Latin America using EJAtlas data. It highlights the extreme violence of disputes, the strong engagement of social movements and traditional communities, and the political gains resulting from socio-environmental struggles.

Presentation long abstract

The aim of this communication is to provide an overview of environmental conflicts in Latin America, comparing the region with the rest of the world. The database used is the EJAtlas, which records 4,334 environmental conflicts globally, 1,146 of which are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Overall, the data show that environmental conflicts in Latin America are characterised by the predominance of mineral extraction as the main conflictive sector, extreme levels of violence, the prominent involvement of social movements and traditional communities, and significant political gains.

Regarding the economic and resource-use sectors that provoke conflict, the leading sector in Latin America is Mineral Ores and Building Materials Extraction, whereas in the rest of the world it is Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice/Energy.

In terms of violence, several indicators appear with greater intensity in Latin American conflicts compared with the rest of the world, including the criminalisation of activists, repression, the violent targeting of activists, and deaths.

As for the mobilising groups, local environmental justice organisations and neighbours, citizens and communities are the most frequent both in Latin America and elsewhere. The region’s specificity lies in the comparatively higher participation of Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, and social movements.

With respect to outcomes, several indicators present more positive results in Latin America than in other regions, including strengthening of participation, application of existing regulations, and favourable judicial decisions for environmental justice movements. Project cancellation, the principal positive outcome, displays similar levels in Latin America and the rest of the world.

Presentation short abstract

Waimiri Atroari People territorial governance shows a case in Brazilian Amazonia that generate political ecology in motion, challenging colonial development and conservation concepts and advancing pluriversal alternatives grounded in reparation, relational justice and multispecies coexistence.

Presentation long abstract

The experience of the Waimiri Atroari (WA) People in the Brazilian Amazon illustrates how Latin American political ecology emerges from long-standing territorial struggles against colonial violence, extractivist development, and environmental destruction. The national highway imposed through their territory during Brazil’s military dictatorship, an emblematic project of authoritarian modernization, continues to shape WA landscapes, lifeways, and multispecies relations. Yet WA responses move far beyond resistance: they enact autonomous forms of governance grounded in relational justice, memory, and multispecies coexistence, challenging technocratic conservation and top-down development models that historically marginalize Indigenous authority.

Using participatory and community-driven methods: storytelling, interviews, drawing workshops, GIS, and archival research - this work foregrounds WA conceptualizations of territory exceed legal demarcation, presenting territory as a dynamic and relational process that weaves together landscape transformation, historical memory, and interdependence among human and non-human beings. Their governance reframes infrastructure as a contested site where coexistence and restorative presents are still disputed rather than exclusively spaces of extraction.

By situating WA governance within broader Latin American traditions of political ecology - rooted in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant – or territorialized communities - struggles for autonomy and justice, this research highlights how environmental (in)justice has always been foundational to political ecological thought in the region. It contributes to contracolonial debates on sovereignty, justice, and sustainability by showing how theory and praxis emerge directly from the territories themselves, offering grounded alternatives to dominant development paradigms and expanding what political ecology can be and do.

Presentation short abstract

We use body-mapping and participatory photography with Uwottüja communities to reveal how mining reshapes land and bodies. Embodied storytelling exposes gendered and intergenerational harms while generating counter-mappings of care, resistance, and territorial futures.

Presentation long abstract

Across Latin America, the expansion of extractive frontiers has reshaped not only ecologies but also the intimate relations that sustain social life in territories contested over commodified natural resources, producing racialized, gendered, and intergenerational forms of violence. In the Colombian-Venezuelan Amazon, Indigenous Uwottüja communities confront these transformations as illegal mining of gold and rare-earth minerals encroaches upon their territories, eroding everyday practices of labor, care, mobility, and governance. While political ecology has long examined the socio-environmental impacts of extraction, emerging scholarship emphasizes the need to attend to Indigenous visions of justice and “storytelling otherwise” as decolonial knowledge-making. We ask how can embodied and participatory storytelling practices map the relational and affective disruptions produced by mining, while cultivating alternative forms of resistance grounded in Indigenous territorialities? Drawing on radical cartographies and feminist visceral methodologies, we conducted body-mapping and place-based photography workshops with Uwottüja women and youth, who used their own hands and cameras to portray community spaces through introspective and creative exploration. The resulting cartographies surfaced connections between extractive incursions onto land, youth suicide, and gender-based violence, exposing mining as a relational process that simultaneously acts on land and bodies. Our findings show that these embodied and visual storytelling practices do more than document harm: they actively reanimate sensorial registers of place and articulate counter-mappings of resistance and care. By positioning collaborative storytelling as theory in motion, our work contributes to political ecology’s efforts to decolonize knowledge production and offers communities and practitioners tools to envision territorial futures beyond extractive development.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how settler colonialism continues to shape the occupied territory known as Mexico through the ideology of mestizaje.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines how settler colonialism continues to shape the occupied territory known as Mexico through the ideology of mestizaje. Often celebrated as a discourse of racial harmony, mestizaje functions instead as a tool of racial and spatial domination, erasing Afro-Indigenous presence and legitimizing the ongoing dispossession of their lands and waters. By tracing how mestizaje operates as both a state policy and an everyday practice, this paper argues that it sustains anti-Black and anti-Indigenous structures of power that normalize violence against racialized territories and the communities that inhabit them.

Grieving Geographies are spaces of collective mourning that emerge from the intertwined loss of human and more-than-human life. Engaging with critical race theory, feminist geography and anthropology, and political ecology, this paper explores the intersections of gender, race, and environment along the Coast of Oaxaca. In this region, Black and Indigenous women grieve lagoons dying before their eyes—ecosystems collapsing under governmental neglect, pollution, and neoliberal extractivism. Their mourning also extends to the loss of community members to the pervasive violence accompanying racial and territorial dispossession.

Yet amid grief, these women organize to defend life, livelihood, and the lagoons that sustain them. Through everyday practices of care, solidarity, and resistance, they cultivate affective and material relations that challenge settler colonial logics of annihilation. Grief, in this context, becomes an ethical and political force—a means of reimagining survival and belonging beyond the colonial state.

Presentation short abstract

Dialogue of Water Stories is a methodology implemented in Lake Titicaca to strengthen its local defense. It uses global water struggle experiences to encourage ontological openness, community resonance, and transformative action, positioning watercourses as networked relational spaces.

Presentation long abstract

The presentation will offer conceptual and methodological reflections derived from a community-engaged research process conducted in the binational Lake Titicaca region. While the Peruvian side recently declared the lake a holder of rights, the ecosystem remains critically affected by severe contamination from mining operations and untreated wastewater. The project aimed to strengthen local defense initiatives by facilitating the brothering of struggles through arenas for co-learning, collective reflection, and transformative action.

The presentation will provide a detailed exposition of the "Dialogue of Water Stories" methodology, which will be presented as an approach co-designed with local civil society organizations. It centered on storytelling international water defense struggles (e.g., the Whanganui, Atrato, and Jordan Rivers) to mobilize action in the local context. Key methodological elements included utilizing deep attention, the "Formemos un río" dynamic to encourage ontological openness, and facilitating reflective spaces to generate resonance among participants. The methodology successfully articulated the plurality of community water values and historical care practices, particularly those maintained by women. By establishing symbolic, trans-local connections between struggles, the process prompted attendees to move beyond alienation and engage in self-critical dialogue regarding the lake's degradation. The presentation will conclude that the "Dialogue of Water Stories" is a fertile approach for mobilizing transformative action led by local communities, positioning watercourses as "networked relational spaces" that inspire socio-environmental transformations.

Presentation short abstract

We investigated the plural, locally-derived priorities and benefits of forest restoration by conducting in-depth participatory mapping workshops with two Indigenous communities, two Afro-descendant (Quilombola) communities, and two agrarian-reform settlements in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil.

Presentation long abstract

Forest restoration has gained global momentum, with proclaimed positive effects anticipated to impact socio-ecological systems worldwide. Despite the potential positive outcomes achieved through forest restoration (hereafter restoration), many projects have neglected to focus on social and biocultural benefits of restoration at the local level. Erasures of locally-derived restoration priorities by larger-scale actors (e.g. project developers, practitioners, funders, and scholars) have resulted in inequitable distributions of benefits and tree mortality. It is therefore crucial to determine some of the key locally-derived, plural priorities and benefits of restoration. In this study, we investigated how communities conceptualize the priorities and benefits of restoration by conducting in-depth participatory mapping workshops with two Indigenous communities, two Afro-descendant (Quilombola) communities, and two agrarian-reform settlements in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil–a top global priority biome for restoration. Through transdisciplinary mapmaking exercises on conceptions of restoration, we assembled five primary themes on the plural ways that communities have reappropriated the concept of restoration and created alternatives to how restoration has been commonly represented by larger-scale actors. These include: asserting territorial sovereignty and defending claims to lands; Bem Viver (living well); contesting dominant narratives about monoculture, capitalism, and land speculation; caring for ancestors, animals, and other living things, and fulfilling spiritual and cultural responsibilities; and realizing dreams and visions for desired futures. We highlight the critical role of communities in the restoration process and the importance of conducting direct work with affected communities. This research may support action towards a restoration future that is both effective and equitable.

Presentation short abstract

This article draws on Amazonian socio-bioeconomies to advance critical conceptions of security, showing how alternative visions on development are key to advance forms of security that support life, as opposed to extractivist development models which reproduce insecurities across worlds and species.

Presentation long abstract

This article draws on the experiences of socio-bioeconomies in the Amazon to advance critical and alternative conceptions of environmental security. The concept of security, and particularly environmental security, has been the subject of intense debate and has evolved significantly in recent decades to address the complex socio-ecological issues of our time. However, critical perspectives on environmental security have lacked an engagement with development, not confronting how deeply intertwined they are. Amazonian socio-bioeconomies are production models which prioritise biological and human diversity and the well-being of more-than-human communities, rooted in the responsible use and restoration of forests and rivers and on the recognition of the interconnectedness human and non-human life and land, as well as committed to economic and epistemological justice and democracy. By looking at various socio-bioeconomy projects led by Amazonian communities, we show how alternative perspectives on development, rooted in plurality and relationality, are fundamental for advancing forms of security that truly serve the flourishing of socio-ecological life, as opposed to conventional, capitalist, extractivist and predatory development models which reproduce insecurities across worlds and species. By critically unpacking the security-development dichotomy, we come to recognise security as a lived and co-produced process grounded in the relationships among many forms of life.

Presentation short abstract

In this paper, I examine how gold miners understand the production of global commodity chains, their role in creating extractive frontiers, and how their stories from below have informed grassroots struggles and imaginaries in the Brazilian Amazon.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I examine how gold miners understand the production of global commodity chains, their role in creating extractive frontiers, and how their stories have informed grassroots struggles and imaginaries in the Brazilian Amazon. To illustrate this, I recount the life story of Pará, a former river trader and prospector who spent over forty years searching for gold in the Brazilian Amazon. I met him in 2021 when he was living in a goldfield in Serra Pelada, near the Carajás Mining Complex. As he recounted the emergence of the world’s largest iron ore mines while sifting through soil in search of gold, he connected his family’s history as river traders in Amazonia with his own non-linear trajectory. In doing so, he revealed the role of small-scale players in enabling large-scale extraction. Although gold miners are often dismissed in public debate, their stories and understanding of extraction have been crucial in informing the struggles of peasant and indigenous movements resisting the Carajás Mining Complex. For movements such as the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining in the Amazon, stories like Pará’s are not merely theoretical constructs. They are instead theory in motion, mobilised to confront extraction and dispossession, and to reimagine possible futures for the region. I argue that ethnographic storytelling and ‘stories from below’ are both analytical tools for understanding extraction across generations and cycles of resource exploitation as well as key sources of knowledge and insight for social movements currently resisting extraction.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation outlines the methodology and results of an action research project that used school meals to recover the traditional diet of the Ugoro’gmo-Arara, a predominantly hunter-gatherer Amazonian indigenous group contacted in the 1980s.

Presentation long abstract

The Ugoro’gmo-Arara people are an Amazonian indigenous group speaking a Karib group language. Before contact with non-indigenous society, which occurred in the 1980s, the Arara lived predominantly by hunting and gathering, moving along the interfluve between the Xingu and Tapajós rivers. After contact, the Brazilian National Indigenous People Foundation (FUNAI) settled the Arara on the banks of the Iriri River and used agriculture as a sedentarization technique, which became the people's main form of subsistence from then on. Access to social policies and measures to combat hunger, such as Bolsa Família (a Brazilian social welfare program), retirement benefits for the elderly, and the school feeding program, allowed the group greater access to foods from the urban markets. These changes in diet had a negative impact on the health of the Arara and led to the erosion of knowledge about the foods they consumed before contact. This presentation outlines the results of an action research project that used the food served in Arara village schools as a tool to recover and encourage the consumption of the people's traditional foods. The research results revealed a wide variety of forest foods whose knowledge was not being passed down from the generation of elders who lived before contact to the new generations. Furthermore, the data allowed for reflection on food sovereignty strategies of hunter-gatherer groups in the Amazon and are being used to adjust the regulations of some Brazilian government public policies so that they also take on this role of decolonizing eating habits.

Presentation short abstract

Racial capitalism creates not only sacrifice zones, but also "sacrificable" bodies. Situated within FPE, this paper examines how violence is inscribed in spaces and bodies, centering the experience of Quilombolan women of Ilha de Maré/Brazil, resisting the intoxication of their land and bodies.

Presentation long abstract

Extractive violence is central to the capitalist system in the Anthropocene and creates sacrifice zones, which experience environmental conflicts and social inequalities along lines of race, class, and gender. Understanding extractive political economies as multiscalar, this paper focuses on glocal entanglements by asking how extractive violence manifests in spaces and is embedded in global structures, leading to systematic constructions of vulnerable bodies to extractive violence. This paper draws attention to spatial relations of power and how socio-economic inequalities are inscribed in land and bodies. It argues that extractive violence not only constructs spatial sacrifice zones, but also 'sacrificable’ bodies. Taking everyday experiences of affected communities as epistemological points of departure and their knowledge claims seriously, this paper asks how extractive violence is inscribed in spaces and bodies. Utilizing the concept of sacrifice zones, this paper examines the case of the artisanal fisherwomen of the Quilombo of Ilha de Maré, Brazil, and their continuous resistance against a petroleum supply chain and the intoxication of their land and water. Through an ethnographic approach, this paper reveals how communities in a postcolonial setting resist destruction in their daily lives and perceive it as a form of extractive violence. Drawing on Racial Capitalocene (Vergès) and Decolonial Ecology (Ferdinand 2021), this paper links racialization, colonial continuities, and environmental entanglements. Situated in Latin American Feminist Political Ecology, it engages debates on situated knowledges and (in)visibility, making a concerted effort to center the experiences of those most affected by and resisting environmental destruction.