Contribution short abstract

Our contribution is a reflexive account of using body-territory methods with rivers and river defenders as Global South researchers in Global North academia, examining care for rivers, activist-scholar tensions, and the risks of translating decolonial methods into (Anglophone) academic spaces.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on the methodological and political tensions of doing research with cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) cartographies in the Arenal River in Colombia and the Dílar-Monachil Rivers in Spain while being researchers from the Global South situated within a Global North university. Body-territory, grounded in Indigenous and communitarian feminist genealogies from Abya Yala, has increasingly entered Anglophone political ecology. Yet its widespread circulation risks epistemic extraction: erasing the historico-political struggles that produced it and neutralizing its decolonial force. We reflect on how we have navigated this risk conceptually, ethically, and affectively, while conducting collaborative research with river defenders.

Drawing from workshops with river dwellers whose everyday care practices sustain river–body–territory continuums, we examine not only how people enact care, but how we learn to care as activist-researchers: how our bodies become implicated in the emotional and hydro-political flows we are researching and how caring-with rivers might confront the extractive logics of Global North academia. Attending to this double movement allows us to interrogate our position as activist-scholars: the opportunities opened by co-researching with river defenders, and the tensions of ‘translating’ situated practices into academic structures shaped by colonial hierarchies. In this sense, self-reflecting on our 'dislocated' positionalities we foreground the epistemic and political risks when methodologies like body-territory travel across geographies. By narrating our research journey as one of becoming-with caring rivers, we argue for a political ecology that remains grounded and attentive to the responsibilities that emerge when we move across epistemic and geographical territories.