Presentation short abstract

We use body-mapping and participatory photography with Uwottüja communities to reveal how mining reshapes land and bodies. Embodied storytelling exposes gendered and intergenerational harms while generating counter-mappings of care, resistance, and territorial futures.

Presentation long abstract

Across Latin America, the expansion of extractive frontiers has reshaped not only ecologies but also the intimate relations that sustain social life in territories contested over commodified natural resources, producing racialized, gendered, and intergenerational forms of violence. In the Colombian-Venezuelan Amazon, Indigenous Uwottüja communities confront these transformations as illegal mining of gold and rare-earth minerals encroaches upon their territories, eroding everyday practices of labor, care, mobility, and governance. While political ecology has long examined the socio-environmental impacts of extraction, emerging scholarship emphasizes the need to attend to Indigenous visions of justice and “storytelling otherwise” as decolonial knowledge-making. We ask how can embodied and participatory storytelling practices map the relational and affective disruptions produced by mining, while cultivating alternative forms of resistance grounded in Indigenous territorialities? Drawing on radical cartographies and feminist visceral methodologies, we conducted body-mapping and place-based photography workshops with Uwottüja women and youth, who used their own hands and cameras to portray community spaces through introspective and creative exploration. The resulting cartographies surfaced connections between extractive incursions onto land, youth suicide, and gender-based violence, exposing mining as a relational process that simultaneously acts on land and bodies. Our findings show that these embodied and visual storytelling practices do more than document harm: they actively reanimate sensorial registers of place and articulate counter-mappings of resistance and care. By positioning collaborative storytelling as theory in motion, our work contributes to political ecology’s efforts to decolonize knowledge production and offers communities and practitioners tools to envision territorial futures beyond extractive development.