Activist Research for Environmental Justice: Trajectories and Future Outlooks

This event is supported by the Department of Global Development in the Social, Political, and Ethical Dimensions of Technology in Development job talk series. 

Talk abstract

Colombia, and all Latin American countries, hold a history of transnational unequal ecological exchange that can be traced back to our colonial past. Accordingly, asymmetrical power relations have been defining features of the geographies of domination and resistance in the Americas. Since the 1990s, the neoliberal model in Latin America has pushed for the re-primarization of national economies. In Colombia, neoliberalism meant the expansion of mining, oil and agrarian frontiers, which has unfolded in sustained structural, direct and environmental violence. In this presentation, Dr. Vélez-Torres will share her most important contributions in the areas of environmental racism, environmental justice, and Latin American political ecology, exploring the disputed frontier-making of coca, mining and agrarian development. She will end by sharing her future research directions on (i) low-carbon extractivism, (ii) socio-technical water- and landscapes of 21st Century energy transitions, (iii) emerging environmental conflicts in decarbonization scenarios, and (iv) toxic geographies, and body-land suffering.

Speaker

Irene Vélez-Torres is a Professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environmental Engineering, Universidad del Valle in Colombia.