Presentation short abstract

My PhD fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon explores climate injustices through workshops with frontline collectives. We examined issues affecting our bodies and territories, challenging binaries such as Global North/South, while co-producing critical perspectives on climate coloniality and justice.

Presentation long abstract

As part of my PhD thesis in sociology, currently being written, I here present reflections on my fieldwork that took place in October 2023 in different territories of Pará, the Brazilian Amazon. Through collaborative workshops with a youth collective and a Quilombola community, who are among the most affected by climate injustices in the country, we exchanged knowledge on environmental racism, LGBTQIAPNB+ lives and epistemological inequalities that shape our different social-environmental conditions. We problematised mainstream constructions on inequalities which disregard complexity and diversity, such as terms like Global North/South, and looked into the multiple scales of capitalist extractivism onto territories and bodies of those most affected by climate coloniality, trying to evidence the interdependencies among these scales.

As a student engaged in the principles of action research, I implicate myself in the research, making contradictions and confrontations emerging from the field visible, including privileges, limitations and responsibilities I embody throughout fieldwork, as a Brazilian person who is member of the German academia. I also highlight our workshop debates on how extractive knowledge appropriation works in the political economy of knowledge production, especially on climate issues, which is mainly dominated by the Euro-US academia globally, and the Southeast of Brazil in specific, and cis-upper class-white-hetero led institutions overall. The workshops constitute my methodological-ethical approach, in which I elaborate how the meeting of differently situated onto-epistemologies dialogue and learn with each other, all the while conserving a relational ethics of care to research participants and the territories we were in.

Presentation short abstract

Brazil’s renewable boom reproduces extractive dynamics, driving territorial dispossession and socio-ecological harm. Emerging from affected communities, the Movement of People Affected by Renewable Energies challenges green capitalism and advances climate justice in Abya-Yala.

Presentation long abstract

The rapid expansion of wind and solar energy in Brazil has been celebrated by governments and corporations as evidence of climate leadership and a just energy transition. Yet, mirroring the logic of other extractive activities, these projects depend on the large-scale appropriation of land by globalized capital, resulting in profound territorial, social, and ecological disruptions. While acknowledging the urgency of addressing climate change, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in Brazil have increasingly contested this prevailing model of energy transition, particularly with regard to the asymmetrical distribution of its costs and benefits. The emergence of the “Movimento das Atingidas e Atingidos por Energias Renováveis” (MAR, or Movement of People Affected by Renewables) in 2023 challenges hegemonic narratives that portray energy transition as inherently “clean,” “neutral,” and “inevitable,” revealing instead how green capitalism reproduces long-standing patterns of dispossession across the Abya-Yala region. The movement arises from the lived experiences of fishing communities and smallholder farmers in Brazil’s Northeast who face escalating impacts from wind and solar expansion. These include the systematic absence of prior consultation with traditional peoples, highly asymmetric land-lease arrangements, the degradation of fragile ecosystems such as the Brazilian dry forest (Caatinga), and documented effects on human and animal health. In addition to traditional communities, MAR brings together universities and civil society organizations, which have collectively been constructing a repertoire of claims, methodologies for documenting impacts, and strategies for political action. Together, these efforts directly engage with the agendas of South–South grassroots movements for climate and energy justice.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyses epistemic and socio-territorial struggles in Colombia’s energy transition through the Hidroituango hydropower megaproject, examining how grassroots movements contest dominant narratives and advance critical political ecologies in the Cauca River basin.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines epistemic and socio-territorial struggles within Colombia’s energy transition through the case of the Hidroituango hydropower megaproject in the Cauca River basin. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with grassroots movements defending water and territory, it brings political ecology, critical infrastructure studies, epistemic justice and debates on hydrosocial territories into dialogue.

The paper asks how state and corporate actors frame hydropower as a consensual and necessary climate solution, and how these narratives travel through planning procedures, environmental licensing, security discourses and development promises. t then analyses how campesino communities interpret these interventions and articulate counter-narratives grounded in riverine livelihoods, collective memories and claims to autonomy and dignity.

These struggles over knowledge and authority are not only about a single dam. They show how large-scale renewable energy projects can reproduce, reconfigure or contest longstanding patterns of militarisation, dispossession and exclusion in regions marked by armed conflict and shrinking civic space. Forms of resistance, such as collective organising, public contestation and storytelling, are examined as expressions of political and epistemic agency within Colombia’s energy transition.

In dialogue with Latin American political ecologies and grassroots research, the paper reflects on the possibilities and tensions of engaged, action-oriented research in conflict-affected territories. It argues that centring community knowledges and hydrosocial relations is crucial for understanding how energy transitions shape pathways toward more or less just and peaceful socio-ecological orders.

Presentation short abstract

Colombia's “just energy transition” attempts to reconcile copper extractivism with peasant-farmers’ autonomous agro-food territories. This presentation places a co-produced territorial video podcast (@LazosProfundosPodcast on YouTube) in dialogue with similar perspectives from Abya Yala.

Presentation long abstract

Since 2023, the Colombian government has coined a “just energy transition” that supports peasant-farmer (campesinx) economies but also authorizes further copper mining and processing in highly biodiverse areas. In El Carmen de Atrato, Chocó, El Roble Mine excavates and fills mountains with cement, then processes the copper-rich sediments and exports them to China, along with other concentrates from Peru and Chile. In this context, campesinx women from the surrounding villages have organized themselves into the Peasant-Farmer Platform, carrying out activities to strengthen campesinx identity among young people and children, thereby confronting the pressure to turn their body-territories into the next frontier of the energy transition. In 2024, we co-produced a territorial video podcast called Deep Bonds, available on YouTube @LazosProfundosPodcast. In it, the women shared their perspectives on the growing pressure to expand copper mining in their lands. Since we released this collaborative work, peasant movements throughout Colombia have strengthened the movement for peasant-farmers as rights-bearing subjects, and the women leaders have organized to title their lands as Agro-Food Peasant-Farmer Territories (TECAM). My presentation will explain this context in detail and engage in dialogue with the books Eco-territorial Feminisms in Latin America and the report on Women Defenders Against Mining Extractivism in Abya Yala, inviting future exchanges of knowledge and grassroots action. I will center on our primary relation to the sun, water, and land from a campesinx perspective, but also highlight the contradictions that emerge as public policies attempt to reconcile systemic refusal with mining extractivism.

Presentation short abstract

I explore the global–local dynamics of socio-ecological inequality through the political articulations of Indigenous women in Chile, using horizontal and participatory methodologies that integrate senti-pensamientos, and highlighting action research as a form of collective and political action.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation is based on my doctoral research, in which I explore the global–local dynamics of socio-ecological inequality through the political articulations of Indigenous women in Chile around climate justice and their relationships with diverse actors. To do so, I develop a qualitative and participatory research project grounded in methodological creative practices co-constructed with organized Indigenous women in the country.

From Latin American feminist political ecology, post-structuralist approaches, and a multiscalar perspective, I seek to reconstruct the knowledges and experiences that inform these articulations in contexts of multiple crises, as well as the power relations that shape political repertoires in response to the climate crisis. Understanding these articulations as contingent formations that generate new knowledges and strategies through the political practices and responses of Indigenous women, who develop proposals and alternatives in the face of current environmental and climate scenarios.

In this presentation, I am particularly interested in highlighting the methodological scope of the research, centered on the emotional and affective dimensions, and on the senti-pensamientos (feeling-thinking) involved in socio-ecological inquiry. From there, I reflect on my own involvement in the field, processes of collective construction, and the political potential of horizontality in research. Finally, I propose understanding action research and the joint construction of knowledge as a form of collective action in the context of climate justice—fundamental for the political proposals of organized groups, and also as a way of articulating territories, actors, and senti-pensamientos.

Presentation short abstract

The Indigenous Researchers training Program in the Madre de Dios empowers Indigenous youth to engage critically with knowledge systems and co-produce knowledge in their territories. This panel explores the dynamics of decolonial education and epistemologies in political ecology.

Presentation long abstract

The Indigenous Youth Researchers in Training Program originates from an interdisciplinary project on Indigenous territorial governance in the Peruvian Amazon, developed in collaboration with the Federation of Native Communities of the Madre de Dios River and Tributaries (FENAMAD). Its main objective is to create an intercultural pedagogical space where Indigenous youth can critically reflect on different knowledge systems, develop research skills, and actively engage in the co-production of knowledge from their own territories, contributing to transforming power dynamics in research and challenging traditional approaches.

This process is embedded within an emerging political ecology, where Indigenous knowledge is not only recovered but integrated as a way for resistance and empowerment. Within two years of piloting, the program has achieved key advances including the co-design of pedagogical modules that incorporate perspectives from four Indigenous peoples, the development of own methodologies, and the increasing interest of indigenous youth engaging more in decision-making spaces of the Federation.

This abstract invite reflection on the progress and challenges faced over the past two years, exploring the dynamics of co-production of knowledge and decolonial critical education within Indigenous territories. This contributes to the discussion on the role of education in transforming power relations and how decolonial pedagogies can strengthen Indigenous territorial governance and empower youth as agents of change within their communities.