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.