DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATIVES WITHIN CONTESTED TERRITORIES IN LATIN AMERICA

29-30 January 2020, University of Sheffield

We will pay travel costs for participants from the University of York and the University of Leeds. In addition, we are able to offer up to five £100 bursaries for participants coming from elsewhere (please highlight in your application that you want to be considered for this bursary).

Recent political changes in Latin America point towards a return towards nationalist, (neo)colonial and neoliberal ideologies. Such trends are often accompanied by a deepening of intersectional inequalities, processes of democratic decline, and violations of human rights and rights to nature. Throughout the region, grassroots movements are actively involved in challenging such uneven patterns of development. This is evident in previous and current social uprisings and territorial struggles throughout the region which confront the exploitation of populations and nature, call for a reduction of inequalities, and advocate for development alternatives framed around, among others, the commons, degrowth, feminist and afro-descendent thought, as well as indigenous cosmovisions. Such alternatives possess the potential for sustainability and transferability across different contexts and provide innovative approaches to territory production and associated human-environment relations, values and knowledges. Yet, to date, such alternatives have been marginalised by policy makers and private sector representatives. Importantly, such approaches challenge dominant world-views and are orientated towards the Pluriverse – an understanding of reality that is constituted “not only by many worlds, but by many kinds of worlds, many ontologies, many ways of being in the world, many ways of knowing reality, and experimenting those many worlds” (Querejazu 2016).

This workshop will focus on the construction of development alternatives in the context of Contested Territories, focusing not only on previous and recent social uprisings in Latin America but also on the institutionalisation of development alternatives – for example, within Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s constitutions – as well as on more subtle conscious and unconscious day-to-day practices which put into question conventional forms of development. For full details about this workshop and how you can contribute please download the pdf (available in English/ Spanish/ Portuguese) below.

CfP Development Alternatives Sheffield English

CfP Development Alternatives Sheffield Spanish

CfP Development Alternatives Sheffield Portuguese