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.