Presentation short abstract

Deconstructing 'Population'. By tracing how climate policy and Malthusian thought frame certain lives as excessive or immobile, this paper exposes the colonial hierarchies shaping climate mobility and calls for justice grounded in embodied and territorial struggles.

Presentation long abstract

This article applies Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” framework to critically examine how the term ‘population’ is constructed in climate (im)mobilities discourse. Through a bifold analysis of policy documents (IPCC AR6 WGII, EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, Bangladesh NAP) and historical texts (Malthus, Ehrlich), it reveals how dominant framings of ‘population’ reproduce racialised, gendered, and colonial logics. These framings depoliticise displacement by abstracting diverse communities into demographic threats, erasing lived realities and reinforcing North-South mobility hierarchies. The study identifies three core functions of this problem representation: concealing the role of fossil fuel capitalism in climate-related displacement; legitimising containment policies that immobilise vulnerable populations; and reinforcing hierarchical mobility regimes that privilege populations in the so-called Global North. Integrating the decolonial feminist concept of Cuerpo-Territorio and juxtaposed to Malthusianism, the article argues for a redefinition of ‘population’ as a contested site of embodiment, territoriality, and power. Climate (im)mobilities should thus be addressed not as technocratic challenges but as embedded in struggles over land, sovereignty, and environmental justice. The study concludes by calling for a transformative approach based on mobility justice, decolonial land relations, and redistributive policies centred on the claims of communities most affected by climate change.

Presentation short abstract

From a decolonial environmental justice lens, this research analyses one of the oldest and most severe cases of oil pollution in the Peruvian Amazon, first unpacking the coloniality embedded in it and second examining transformative, holistic justice approaches to address historical injustices.

Presentation long abstract

Oil Block 192 (formerly 1AB) lies in the northern Peruvian Amazon, overlapping Quechua, Achuar, and Kichwa territories. As one of Peru’s oldest and most intensively exploited oil fields, it has caused historical impacts on the environment, health, livelihoods, social organisation, culture, worldviews, and collective rights. Despite significant advances led by Indigenous organisations in the pursuit of justice that resulted in the Peruvian State assuming responsibility for the environmental remediation of longstanding contaminated sites, implementation has been delayed, and there remains no clarity on how other historical impacts will be comprehensively addressed. After more than fifty years of oil extraction, the recognition of harm, remediation processes, and the very notion of justice remain deeply contested, perpetuating violence and impunity.

From a decolonial perspective, this research examines transformative, holistic justice measures that can address the historical impacts of oil extraction within these territories. Drawing on qualitative methods such as conversations with community representatives and documentary analysis, it, first, unravels how the coloniality of power (structural and institutional violence), knowledge (epistemic violence), and being (ontological violence) are embedded in this case, reproducing fundamental forms of harm that must be addressed; and, second, explores insights for rethinking current approaches—such as purely technical environmental remediation—and envisioning transformative, holistic justice frameworks, including decolonial environmental restorative justice and reparations from a Pluriversal standpoint.

The findings aim to contribute to Indigenous communities’ ongoing struggles for justice and to challenge the colonial foundations of the Peruvian state in order to envision pluriversal and more-than-human futures.

Presentation short abstract

Ethnographic research on Indigenous women in Chiloé shows how they confront the commodification of the sea by sustaining and reinventing coastal life. Through hybrid economic, institutional, and community strategies, they defend marine territories and reimagine coastal futures.

Presentation long abstract

This article analyzes the reconfiguration of the relationships between indigenous women in the Chiloé Archipelago and their marine-coastal territories in the context of the expansion of the aquaculture and fishing industries. Using an ethnographic approach, it describes the historical specificity of this link and examines how the commodification of the sea has transformed their relationships with the coast, the sea, and the species that inhabit these ecosystems. The results demonstrate that coastal women sustain, reconfigure, and revitalize island ways of life through a range of strategies that respond to the socio-environmental impacts of industrial expansion: (i) economic and subsistence strategies that combine traditional knowledge with new activities under conditions of uncertainty; (ii) strategies of institutional appropriation and re-signification, particularly through mechanisms such as the Marine-Coastal Spaces of Indigenous Peoples (ECMPO), where women participate actively in governance, recognition, and territorial defense; and (iii) community practices for sustaining life, which reinforce local networks and intergenerational care. The findings show that these strategies coexist within a hybrid web of practices aimed at managing, defending, and inhabiting marine–coastal spaces in ways that resist the privatization of the commons and affirm the continuity of island ways of life that sustain the life of multiple species and their communities.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation proposes a discussion of how research based on decolonial and feminist theories and praxis is a space from which restorative justice is generated for communities impacted by epistemic and other forms of violence.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation proposes a discussion of how research based on decolonial and feminist theories and methodologies is a space from which restorative justice is generated for communities impacted by epistemic and other forms of violence. To do that, it will explore the participatory and creative methodologies applied with community organisations during two transdisciplinary research projects in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala and St. Vincent, in the Caribbean, that co- produced knowledge with Indigenous rural communities impacted by disasters.

The presentation will argue that recounting and narrating these events and places through different forms of creative expressions and knowledge co-production becomes a dual process of transformation and restorative justice. In other words, vulnerability and injustice (caused by colonialism, epistemic oppression and the disaster) is transformed into resistance by collectively envisioning possible futures during the research process. Specifically, I propose to discuss how storytelling and remembering through drawing, photography, or embroidery, among other creative expressions and research methodologies, can serve as a space for reconfiguring people’s relationships to their bodies, territories, knowledges and memory.

Based on de-colonial (Escobar 2015; Rodriguez 2022) feminist (Colectivo Miradas Críticas 2017; Segato 2015; Tsing 2015) and creative research approaches (Armijos and Ramirez 2025), this presentation will aim at opening a discussion on how decolonial and participatory research recognises and enables embodied, everyday experiences of resistance and relational ontologies conducive to restorative justice. I will also reflect on what this type of research entails for researchers.

Presentation short abstract

This paper engages the work of transnational feminist movements organising around seed sovereignty struggles in the Global South in the face of a raft of laws commodifying the seed commons. It takes seriously the possibilities for advancing decolonial feminist legal approaches and solidarities.

Presentation long abstract

A raft of seed related laws which work to significantly limit indigenous seeds and practices like saving, selling and exchange among small holder farmers, and in favour of corporate owned seeds, have firmly gained a significant foothold across the wider Global South in the last three decades (Wattnem, 2016).

In this same period, seed sovereignty struggles have increasingly been re-signified as feminist questions (Conway, 2018). Several transnational (feminist) movements in the broad arena of agrarian struggles (World March of Women and La via Campesina) are now at the forefront of challenging these laws, viewed as central modalities for the expansion of the historical capitalist enclosures of the environmental commons (Rathwell, Armitage & Berkes, 2016).

This paper proposes a critical engagement with the political vernaculars of resistance that these movements deploy to counter the legal regimes of seed commodification, through methodological approaches that centre decolonial and Third World legal feminist approaches (Charlesworth, Chinkin & Wright, 1991; Sen, 2022). Vernaculars of resistance are used here to refer to the rich tapestry of political language forms, emancipatory visions; their material articulations as deployed by the subaltern (Borras Jr., 2023), those on the margins; and very specifically within the intersecting worlds of gender, caste, environmental and agrarian struggles in the Global South (Masson, Paulos & Bastien, 2016).

This paper is ultimately interested in the ways in which transnational feminist seed sovereignty movements advance novel decolonial legal approaches- in the way of radical pedagogy as well as the articulations of transversal feminist solidarities (Mohanty, 2003).

Presentation short abstract

Over the past two decades, environmental litigation has been increasingly used by youth from marginalised groups like the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. This research dives into the action repertoire of these actors to achieve a decolonial environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Environmental litigation is increasingly being used by young plaintiffs to compel governments to stronger climate mitigation measures and to uphold human rights obligations (Parker et al., 2022). Youth environmental activism is not a new phenomenon, however their increasing use of litigation is unprecedented (Kotzé and Knappe, 2023).

Young people share a transnational generational commonality, marked by limited political power, structural marginalization, and significant exposure to climate consequences, compared to previous age groups. They also experience unequal vulnerabilities shaped by socio-economic conditions, colonial legacies, and intersecting factors (Arrouche and Hammou, 2024), reinforced by global injustices embedded within a neocolonial international system.

Existing scholarship leaves a gap regarding Global South litigation (Murcott and Tigre, 2024) and on how youth use legal avenues as a form of political action. Moreover, most analyses focus on intergenerational justice while overlooking intra-generational inequalities (Slobodian, 2020; André and Gosseries, 2024).

This research seeks to address these gaps by examining the roles and practices of marginalised youth, through a comparative approach of three landmark cases (ICJ Request for an Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (July 2025), Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Petition of Children of Cité Soleil and SAKALA (February 2021), Committee on the Rights of the Child, Sacchi et al. v. Argentina et al (October 2021). Drawing on a documents analysis and decolonial approaches (Ferdinand, 2019 ; Mignolo, 2018; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021), it explores how young actors develop supranational strategies and articulate claims for decolonial and anti-racist environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Amidst global calls for "greening" and decarbonizing industries, particularly within frameworks like the European Green Deal, critical examination of their implications in the Global South remains imperative. This paper interrogates the political economy of green sustainable mining through decolonial feminist geographies, revealing how discourses of sustainable mining reproduce colonial territorialization and capitalist accumulation.

Centering iron ore extraction in Odisha, India—where Adivasi (such as Munda, Gond and Paudi bhuiyan) and Dalit communities face dispossession from forested mineral-rich lands—I deploy decolonial feminist political ecology to critique green industrial transitions that reproduce colonial, gendered, and caste-based environmental violence. Drawing on fieldwork in Sundargarh district's Koida block, I analyze how Adivasi women mine workers and anti-mining activists navigate intersecting structures of patriarchy, caste hierarchy, and extractive capitalism.

"Green" or "sustainable" mining operates as colonial continuity through resource appropriation, increasing labor precarity, ecological destruction, and caste and gender-based violence. Through a decolonial feminist intersectional lens, I examine how Adivasi women's reproductive and wage labor gets explioted in the mining sector, while anti-mining activists defend Jal-Jangal-Zameen (water-forests-land) through collective popular protests against mining companies.

Theoretically, this paper bridges Black geographies literature with scholarship on caste and indigeneity to unpack how "green" mining operates through environmental racism alongside patriarchal and caste-based ideologies. This research contributes to decolonial feminist geographical scholarship by demonstrating how Adivasi women negotiate and challenge extractive logics, creating alternative spatial practices that contest violence embedded in green industrial capitalism and envision liberatory ecological futures.

Presentation short abstract

This paper traces women-led resistance in the Niger Delta from the 1929 Women’s War to anti-oil protests today, showing how Afro-feminist, embodied, and spiritual practices reclaim land and body as demonic grounds of anti-colonial and ecological resistance.

Presentation long abstract

This article examines the continuity of women-led resistance in the Niger Delta, tracing a lineage from the Women’s War of 1929 against British colonial rule to contemporary protests against Shell and the oil industry. Across these struggles, Niger Delta women have reclaimed both land and body through acts of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. Drawing on Afro-feminism and Feminist Political Ecology (FPE), the article explores how women disrupt continuous cycles of dispossession by transforming the landscape into a site of embodied, spiritual, and ecological insurgency.

Through oral histories, archival traces, and counter-cartographic methods, I analyze practices such as naked protests, ritual occupations, and mangrove replanting as expressions of demonic grounds (McKittrick, 2006): spaces where Black women’s bodies and spiritual power reconfigure colonial mappings of territory, gender, and life itself. By foregrounding nakedness as an epistemic and spiritual strategy rather than a sign of vulnerability, this paper repositions environmental justice as an Afro-feminist praxis rooted in refusal, memory, and care. It argues that these embodied forms of resistance expose the enduring entanglements of empire, patriarchy, and oil, while gesturing toward alternative, decolonial geographies of justice and survival in the Niger Delta.

Presentation short abstract

Seeking grantees in Poland, Spain and Greece revealed how Western climate justice frames clash with local histories, distrust of philanthropy, and uneven geographies of organising. We show how movement-based knowledge can reframe climate justice through semiperipheral and grassroots perspectives.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation draws on field reflections from the scouting process of the Collective Abundance fund across Poland, Spain and Greece. Collective Abundance is a new philanthropic initiative that aims to redistribute resources to grassroots movements and to support collaborative funding processes shaped by the needs, knowledges and priorities of the groups themselves. These three country contexts reveal how dominant environmental justice frames, shaped in western policy and NGO environments, often fail to resonate with local struggles.

As scouts rooted in grassroots movements, we repeatedly met tensions that challenged mainstream understandings of climate justice. Across all three countries, the term had weak grounding and was often associated with professional environmentalism or academia rather than social struggles. Workers’ collectives spoke of class, exploitation and unsafe labour. Queer and BIPOC groups described their struggles with state violence, racism, and queer/transphobia. Rural communities fighting destructive projects spoke of fear, surveillance and the challenges of resistance. These experiences carried an understanding of justice, but it did not easily translate into the language of the climate crisis.

Our scouting turned into a work of translation, and relational learning, where the meaning of climate justice was shaped within the groups themselves. This work showed that justice is articulated through lived experiences of exclusion, exploitation and resistance, not through abstract environmental narratives. We reflect on scouting as a non-obvious methodological tool for political ecology fieldwork - one that foregrounds positionality while allowing access to embodied knowledges and voices of distrust that challenge the dominant notion of climate justice.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines the potential and limits of cuerpo-territorio in political ecology, showing how embodied and relational practices illuminate socio-environmental conflicts while requiring a situated, critical and politically committed use.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation critically examines how feminist approaches to cuerpo-territorio open powerful analytical and methodological possibilities for political ecology, while requiring careful reflection on their limits and ethical responsibilities. Drawing from research in Colombia and Catalonia, we show how embodied practices and relational ontologies shape socio-ecological disputes and collective resistance. Grounded in Latin American feminist epistemologies, we argue that cuerpo-territorio is primarily a political and ontological proposition rather than a neutral or universally applicable method. Emerging from the historic struggles of Indigenous women against patriarchal and colonial violence, its use in other contexts demands more than methodological adaptation: it requires political commitment, contextual sensitivity, and deep reflexivity regarding researchers’ positionalities. Empirically, we reflect on three research experiences: (1) body-mapping, collective mapping, and theatre-forum workshops with social movements in Catalonia; (2) collaborative work with Black women leaders engaged in mangrove restoration and environmental defence in Cartagena; and (3) reframing water governance in the Llobregat basin through the idea of the river as a living body. Across these cases, we illustrate how cuerpo-territorio operates as a situated, relational analytical tool—one that incorporates researchers’ own bodies and political entanglements into the research process. We argue that cuerpo-territorio enriches political ecology by illuminating multiscalar socio-environmental conflicts through embodied and relational perspectives. Yet its use must remain context-based, ethically grounded, and accountable to the feminist, Indigenous, and community struggles that created it. It is not a ready-made method, but a lens that must emerge from and respond to specific political and affective conditions of each territory.

Presentation short abstract

Explores how care is framed and enacted from the intersectional identities articulated in the resistance against green extractivism in Colombia; what does it imply for the lived and embodied experience of women defenders, and to what extent it shapes the impact of their mobilisation.

Presentation long abstract

In 2018, the Canadian corporation Libero Copper started to reactivate a large-scale copper mining project aiming to extract copper and molybdenum in the mountains in the convergence of the eastern Andean cordillera and the northwestern Colombian Amazon rainforest. Framed as part of the energy transition, this project is being pushed by the Colombian government and met with strong resistance by a diverse fabric of indigenous and non-indigenous women defenders, aiming to defend life, water and territory. The project aims to disrupt the Yagé cultural complex, a pre-Hispanic network of exchange around shamanic knowledges and practices associated with entheogen plants, which are foundational to the biocultural reproduction of local people and play a key role in mobilisation against green extractivism.

This paper explores how self and collective care are framed and enacted from the intersectional identities articulated in the territorial defence against critical mineral extraction in the Andean Amazon; what does this divergent framing imply for the lived and embodied experience of women defenders, and to what extent it shapes the impact of their mobilisation within structural axes of oppression and broader sociopolitical processes. Employing decolonial feminist lens and through the analyses of the empirical case in the Andean-Amazon where I am currently doing my research in collaboration with women environmental defenders, I aim to contribute to the discussion regarding how individual and collective agencies shape energy futures, and how care, grounded in relational onto-epistemological configurations, shapes the resistance against dominant solutions to the current socio-ecological crises.

Presentation long abstract

As per the Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), indigenous people have mobilized more than half of the environmental justice movements in India (57%). Adivasis are also the most affected (over 40%) by the ecological conflicts in India. Communities that are at the forefront of social, environmental, and cultural injustices in many regions, including India, protest the continuous colonial-era environmental extraction. The motivations for resistance are rooted in opposition to ongoing dominance of modern, colonial, capitalist, and extractive tendencies that are a result of social difference, including gender, race, caste, & class.  To study the motivations of the indigenous people, particularly indigenous youth who are at the core of many environmental movements in India, it is important to understand the unequal power dynamics and structural & systematic injustices that exist as a result of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. In this paper, I propose the theory of intersectionality to examine the motivations of indigenous youth activists. I particularly propose Patricia Hill Collins ‘matrix of domination’ that comes from intersectionality research to examine the systematic and structural power injustices. The ‘Matrix of domination’. This will help understand the role of systemic and structural domination The goal is to move beyond examining the vulnerabilities of the youth to how the unequal power dynamics impact their lives and shape their activism. An intersectional lens in understanding the motivations for mobilizing for environmental change will contribute to decolonial environmental justice and bring forth the voices from the Global south.  

Presentation short abstract

Climate action without justice is white supremacy in green clothing. Drawing on Black experiences in the heart of empire (UK), we use antiblackness framing to interrogate practice that is addressing DRR for floods, creating collective futures that are liberatory, emancipatory and therefore equitable

Presentation long abstract

Current public discourses around climate action call for resilience, social value and inclusion, yet hardly ever mention race, racism, or colonialism. Framing the debates around "inclusion" in this way, this logic where whiteness defines the terms of climate participation replicates the logics of exclusion: of Britain’s undocumented migrants, working-class Black families displaced by flooding and more generally Black and racialised communities, both globally in the Global South and locally in the Global North, who are already living with the climate emergency in deadly, material ways. This is climate universalism in its most pernicious form, erasing structural difference under the guise of unity. As Christina Sharpe (2016) writes, Black people are not simply in the climate crisis, we are already living in the weather, exposed, abandoned, and made to endure in ways whiteness cannot imagine. Some climate movements and praxis omit this fundamental truth claiming to be post-ideological, but ideologies that refuse to name power end up reinforcing it. Climate majority projects that have no analysis of empire, no critique of racialised disposability, and no acknowledgement of global climate apartheid, are only able to offer a detour instead of a roadmap to justice, sadly one that leaves the most vulnerable out of the picture entirely. Climate action must start with the truth. Not just the truth about emissions, but the truth about who has been made killable in the name of growth. It is in the now we need to bring our challenge so imaginaries of just collective futures can emerge.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines gendered environmental injustices among displaced fisherpeople in China’s Nature Reserves, revealing how fisherwomen navigate livelihood loss and identity change through a feminist political ecology lens to inform gender-sensitive ecological governance.

Presentation long abstract

Amidst the depletion of fishery resources and the expansion of ecological governance, an increasing number of fisherpeople are being displaced from the aquatic ecosystems on which their livelihoods depend, particularly within China’s nature reserves. While these policies have improved ecological conditions, they have also produced new environmental injustices. Displaced fisherpeople face systemic vulnerabilities, including disrupted livelihoods, identity crises, and weakened social ties. These environmental injustices are profoundly gendered: fisherwomen, who were once crucial to family fishing and aquaculture but are burdened by domestic responsibilities, experience greater hardship during livelihood transitions.

However, existing policy and research often portray these impacted fisherpeople as a homogeneous vulnerable group, neglecting how gendered norms and power relations shape the environmental justice and their coping capacities. This study draws on participant observation and interviews with fisherwomen in China's Lake Nature Reserves to examine these dynamics through a feminist political ecology lens. By centring women’s narratives of displacement and adaptation, it reveals how identity, place, and power intersect in their struggles and strategies, offering a more nuanced portrayal of environmental justice from a feminist perspective.

The study advances feminist and environmental justice scholarship by challenging the depoliticised view of ecological governance and calling for gender-sensitive policies that recognise and address the differentiated impacts of conservation on marginalised communities in China.