Presentation short abstract

Fire reveals a planet in crisis, but also the suppressed possibilities of alternative modernities. Beyond destruction, it carries traditions of care, resistance, and renewal that challenge capitalist dispossesion and exploitation and open paths toward relational, equitable, eco-social futures.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines fire not only as a material force reshaping a planet in flames, but also as a symbolic threshold between competing visions of modernity. In dominant global narratives—those forged through dispossession, exploitation, and the colonial, neocolonial, and neoliberal management of people and territory—fire appears as the emblem of devastation: a destructive agent unleashed by an eco-social order that renders landscapes flammable, labor disposable, and futures precarious. Yet beyond this paradigm of planetary burning lies another lineage. Across Indigenous, racialized, and socialist practices in the Global South, fire can be understood as a medium of care, renewal, and collective transformation: a tool for relational ecologies, historical memory, and emancipatory horizons.

Reading contemporary fires alongside these histories of resistance, the presentation builds on the arguments of Incendios: una crítica ecosocial del capitalismo inflamable [Infernos] to frame current eco-social crises as a crisis of imagination. As forests, factories, and tower blocks ignite worldwide, what burns is also an exhausted model that encloses universality by excluding most of the world. Against this failing worldview, the presentation sketches an alternative approach to an unfinished project of modernity—grounded in reciprocity over exploitation, communal stewardship over commodification, and the incomplete promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, continually reoriented by Indigenous cosmologies, Black radical traditions, and socialist experiments in the Global South. Fire, in this sense, emerges both as a warning and an inspiration that, while exposing systemic catastrophe, also sparks the untapped potential for revolutionary eco-social transformation on a planetary scale.