Programme

Land Reading Session
Date and time: 04/10/24, Friday, at 11:00am, room 2, CES | Alta
Title: "Land: Drawing connections between bodies and territories through cartography, theater and cinema"
Coordination: Gustavo Garcia-Lopez, Mariana Riquito, Flora Pereira da Silva

This session will focus on the concept of the body-territory-land from different perspectives and regions. The concept of the body-territory-land has been developed by Latin American feminist and decolonial academic activists working with communities, particularly women, in resistance against extractivism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and colonialism, and their violence. Mapping bodies-territories seeks to center the embodied knowledge, practices, and visions of exploited and silenced peoples-territories. It enunciates and visualizes the intrinsic connections between the material and the affective, the “feeling” and the “thinking,” what happens in territories and in our bodies through a body drawn, filmed, danced, or collectively (en)acted. In this session, we will discuss readings that offer reflections on the concept and practice of body-territory-land in the theater of the oppressed, in cinema, and in urban and rural cartography in Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, and Spain-Morocco.

Readings 

• Conceptual framework and body-territory mapping practice:

Zaragocin, S. & Carretta. M.A. (2021). Body-Territory: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(5)

• Theater of the oppressed practice

Rodríguez, L., et al. (2020) Desde el cuerpo: arte, política y transformación. Compartires de Magdalenas Uruguay-Teatro de las Oprimidas (chapter in the book Cuerpos, Territorios y Feminismos) 

• Filmmaking practice 

Dehn, R. (2023). Crossing borders: Body-territory and knowledge production in Randa Maroufi Artistic Practice. Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo

Suggested further reading 

• Body-territory mapping practice 

Heimer, R. et al. (2022) Body Mapping: Mapping women\'s resistance to violence in the favelas of Mare, Rio de Janeiro. King\'s College London.

Water Reading Session 
Date and time: 04/11/24, Mo, at 11:00 am, room 2, CES | Alta
Title: From Exclusion and Profit to Feel-Think-Live: Toward a Political Ecology of Water
Coordination: Ana Paula Lemes de Souza, Ananda Martins Carvalho, Eliane Sebeika Rapchan.

Water is part of our lives in multiple forms and manifestations, and it is the subject of different understandings and controversies. On the one hand, the instrumentalization, appropriation, and definition of a profitable function for water have predominated, converging with the conceptions associated with the capitalist and colonial modernity of the world. On the other hand, for diverse cultures around the globe, water can appear as a common good or as an entity that participates in life in relationships of care and reciprocity.

This reading group session will discuss various uses and meanings associated with water and insurgencies in the face of processes that distort its meaning as a common good. In “Intimations of Modern Water?” the various understandings of water in the modern world and the social and political dimensions of the relationship between water and society are presented. In the article “Precarious Lives in Turbid Waters: collaborative anthropology in the ruins of the Anthropocene”, research experiences in the waters of rivers, seas, and mangroves are reported. Finally, in “How rivers are reborn,” we are invited to participate in conversations between farmers, activists, and a researcher about the recovery of rivers and the enchantment of everyday life.

Readings

We suggest that the material be read-viewed in the sequence 1 - 2 - 3

• (1) Linton, Jamie. “3. Intimations of Modern Water”, What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Nature|History|Society Series, Ed. University of British Columbia, p. 47-72. 

• (2) Andrés, R.; Gonçalves, N.; Paula, I. e Brito, C. “Como renascem os rios?”, in Moulin et al. seres-rios. São Francisco, Jequitinhonha, Doce, Belo Horizonte: BDMG Cultural, p. 287- 307.

• (3) Lopes, D. K. et al. 2021. Vidas Precárias em Águas Turvas: antropologia colaborativa nas ruínas do Antropoceno. Ilha: Revista de Antropologia, 23(1), 97-126.

Fire Reading Session 

Date and time: 18/11/24, Friday, at 11:00 am, room 2, CES | Alta
Title: The Power of Fire - history, relationships and imaginaries
Coordination: Joana Sousa and Jonas Van Vossole

Fire presents itself, expresses itself, shines, consumes, and consumes itself. It disappears. It falls silent. Then it returns, ... always returns. More or less desperately fire happened (and happens). Fire has been part of productive cycles and moments related to agriculture and pastoralism, processing and cooking, hunting, rituals, protest, and conflict. Its meaning spans from its coziness and useful nature to its immense, grotesque, and life-threatening force that defies understanding. This session focuses on the reading of two texts that offer different perspectives on fire: one text follows the rhythm of a literary essay that explores the existence of fire, in its wild and tame forms, in the lives of people, animals, and places in Guinea-Bissau. The other text is an analysis of fire in the Western United States during the 20th century, viewed through the lens of historical materialism. Fire is analyzed as part of nature\'s revenge and as significant in processes of expropriation and the precarization of labor.

Readings

• Montenegro, Teresa. 2021. Fogo manso, fogo bravo. Sintidus, 4, pp. 7-20.

• Dockstader, Sue. 2024. An accumulation of catastrophe: A political economy of wildfire in the Western United States. PhD Dissertation. University of Oregon

Atmosphere Reading Session 

Date and time: 09/12/24, Monday, at 2:00 pm, room 2, CES | Alta
Title: Is it possible to colonize the atmosphere? Reflections on forests and the commodification of climate
Coordination: Flora Pereira da Silva

Is it possible to colonize the atmosphere? This session aims to discuss the commodification of climate, looking closely at the carbon credit market. In the context of forests, such mechanisms have been denounced by territorial and indigenous movements for being empty or weak in community participatory processes, for not distributing the credit generated, and for instilling sanctions on the people who live in the forest, and are prevented from accessing the natural resources to which their life, culture and subsistence are linked to. The articles presented reflect on the coloniality of conservation and on how the logic of such projects often reproduces the model that gave rise to the climate problem we are experiencing, transforms carbon into a new major commodity, and relegates forests (and their organic capacity to regulate the planet's air) to empty spaces, objects of an extractive policy, as resources to be exploited and exhausted, or as untouchable.
 

Readings:

Okereke, C., & Dooley, K. (2010). Principles of justice in proposals and policy approaches to avoided deforestation: Towards a post-Kyoto climate agreement. Global Environmental Change,20(1), 82–95

Simone Lovera‐Bilderbeek & Souparna Lahiri, 2021. "Addressing power imbalances in biosequestration governance," Global Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 12(S1), pages 57-66, April.

Final section
Date and time: 16/12/24, Monday, room 2, CES | Alta
Title: How to read and write about the ecological crisis?
Coordination: Ananda Martins Carvalho, Eliane Sebeika Rapchan, Flora Pereira da Silva, Gustavo García-López, Jonas Van Vossole

To close the Reading Group's year of activities, we will hold two sessions on December 16: an internal evaluation session with the cycle participants and a panel open to the community.
 

10:00 am - 12:00 pm: How to read and write about the ecological crisis? A methodological (and life-changing) evaluation of the reading group and celebratory dinner

We will have an internal moment with those who were part of this reading cycle to look at the work from a theoretical-methodological point of view. We will hold a discussion group to evaluate what was done during the last year and to reflect on the contributions that the readings have brought to our research and also to our lives beyond the academic space. We will end the day with a collective dinner for those in Coimbra. Cycle participants will receive information about costs and registration by email.
 

2:00 pm - 4:00 pm: How to read and write about the ecological crisis? Open conversation with authors

To celebrate one year of the Reading Group's activities, we will hold a discussion panel, bringing some of the authors studied and inviting them to reflect on the meanings and possible paths for writing and reading about the climate crisis. At this meeting, which marks the end of the Reading Group's first year, we will have the presence of guests whose texts were discussed during the sessions, highlighting the relevance and celebrating the encounter with their work. The goal is to address what authors have provoked in our senses and actions, what they represent in our academic and professional paths, and as compasses that inspire our life trajectories.

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