Political Ecology, Gender and the Environment in Latin America

Issue editors - Mayarí Castillo (Universidad Mayor - CIIR – CESIEP) and Katy Jenkins (Northumbria University)

The topic of political ecology and the environment is of growing importance throughout Latin America, especially due to widespread and growing numbers of socio-environmental conflicts, extractive pressures, and the enormous challenges that climate change poses for the region. Across the social sciences, recent scholarship in this area is strengthening and consolidating an interdisciplinary research field, the foundations of which were laid by Latin American thinkers such as Héctor Alimonda and Enrique Leff. Political ecology gives us the opportunity to interrogate the networks of power and politics that influence the character and development of socio-environmental conflicts and the fundamental intersection of the environment, the social and the political in the experience of the people who live these struggles on a daily basis.

In considering the extractive industries, we include activities such as mining, salmon industry, oil extraction, agribusiness, and forestry, among others. Literature analyzing these extractive activities has recently highlighted the centrally important role of women in establishing national and international socio-environmental movements that contest the nature and impacts of large-scale resource extraction, as well as the contribution of women to fomenting debate on these topics in the public sphere. The involvement of women particularly reflects the gendered nature of reproductive and caring roles, as well as the significant and disproportionate negative impacts that women experience in relation to processes of environmental change and intensive extraction of resources. Thus, across Latin America, there are now a great many women leaders of social movements. These social movements have particular political and economic relevance, given their links to disputes over the ownership and control of natural resources, long-established sources of strategic wealth in the region. Set alongside the fact that women have historically been less visible as leaders, their contribution here is even more important. In a regional context where the criminalization and persecution of activists is increasingly common, it is also extremely important to apply a gender perspective to enable us to understand how women experience this trajectory whilst being subject to a large number of risks.

Above all, it is the work of women, and especially feminist, academics that has driven the recognition of the gendered dimension of this field of research. The relative (in)visibility of gender in relation to socio-environmental disputes has also been linked to broader debates around the lack of visibility of women who work in this field: this is epitomised by the controversy around the article by Victor M. Toledo in La Jornada, in which he reviewed the field of political ecology in Latin America and research in the area of ​​the environment without naming any women, despite their importance in each of the national academies. This situation speaks to us of the need to open up spaces to make this research more visible, generating conditions for a debate that celebrates the contributions of women scholars in this field and enables a broader perspective, through studies that underline the importance of gender and other key variables – taking an intersectional approach – in the construction of identities.

In this regard, this special issue seeks to reflect on the relevance of gender to research on the environment and political ecology, through a multidisciplinary perspective that cuts across Ecology, Human Geography, Anthropology, Sociology, Economics and Political Sciences, showcasing recent empirical research and innovative theoretical contributions in the field. From this multiplicity of perspectives, we seek to understand how extractivism in Latin America produces particular effects in terms of gender, from the level of the daily or ‘everyday’ to the macro level, all embedded in networks of unequal power relations. In this sense, the special issue particularly welcomes article proposals from women, and especially minoritised women, in order to promote the greater visibility of those who, from unequal conditions, have produced high-impact and academically excellent research focused on making visible and analyzing the condition and role of women in less privileged positions and complex situations.

We welcome contributions that seek to work across the natural and social sciences, and those which advance transdisciplinary approaches and innovative or mixed methodologies which allow us to interrogate the ways in which the socio-environmental crisis produces particular effects in Latin America, deepening inequities of gender and other identities, whilst at the same time undoing, reducing, or reworking other inequalities. In this regard, it is important that the articles develop theoretical contributions that are appropriate to the reality of the region and that go beyond the literature on women and gender in development, contributing to the construction of a perspective that facilitates interpretation of the Latin American reality.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • Gender relations and women’s leadership in socio-environmental movements
  • Women in urban and rural socio-environmental movements
  • Links between socio-environmental movements and other women’s movements
  • Environmental justice, women and intersectionality in socio-environmental movements
  • Inequality, women and the political economy of socio-environmental conflicts
  • Women, human rights and violence in socio-environmental conflicts
  • Women, socio-environmental conflicts, and the media
  • Women in resistance to megaprojects
  • Gender inequalities, political participation of women in politics and socio-environmental movements.
  • Women, the climate crisis and migratory flows
  • Indigenous and rural women, knowledge and management of territory, agroecological models and food sovereignty
  • Economies of care and social and environmental conflicts.

SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS

To avoid duplication of content, please contact the issue editors to let them know of your interest in submitting and your proposed topic. We encourage submission as soon as possible, preferably by December 15, 2021, but this call will remain open as long as it is posted on the LAP web site.

Manuscripts should be no longer than 8,000 words of paginated, double-spaced 12 point text with 1 inch margins, including notes and references, using the LAP Style Guidelines available at www.latinamericanperspectives.com under the “Submit” tab where the review process is also described. Manuscripts should be consistent with the LAP Mission Statement available on the web site under the “About” tab.

Manuscripts may be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. If you do not write in English with near native fluency, please submit in your first language. LAP will translate manuscripts accepted in languages other than English. If you are not submitting in English, please indicate if you will have difficulty reading reviews and/or correspondence from the LAP office in English.

Please feel free to contact the issue editor with questions pertaining to the issue but all manuscripts should be submitted directly to the LAP office, not to the issue editor. A manuscript is not considered submitted until it has been received by the LAP office. You should receive acknowledgment of receipt of your manuscript within a few days. If you do not receive an acknowledgment from LAP after one week, please send a follow-up inquiry to be sure your submission arrived.

E-mail Submissions: send to lap@ucr.edu

Subject Line: Author name – Manuscript for Ecology and Gender issue

Please attach your manuscript as a Word Document (doc or docx)

Include: Abstract (100 words), 5 Keywords, and a separate cover page with short author affiliations (less than 130 words) and complete contact information (e-mail, postal address, telephone).

Postal correspondence may be sent to: Managing Editor, Latin American Perspectives¸ P.O. Box 5703, Riverside, California 92517-5703.

For an article with more than one author, provide contact information for all authors but designate one person as the Corresponding Author who will receive correspondence from the LAP office. If any contact information changes while your manuscript is under consideration, please send the updated information to LAP promptly.

Submission of a manuscript implies commitment to publish in the journal. Authors should not submit a manuscript that has been previously published in English in identical or substantially similar form nor should they simultaneously submit it or a substantially similar manuscript to another journal in English. LAP will consider manuscripts that have been published in another language, usually with updating. Prior publication should be noted, along with the publication information.

Issue editor contact information:

Mayarí Castillo, Centro de Economía y Políticas Sociales – Universidad Mayor. Antropóloga Social, Universidad de Chile. Correo electrónico: mayari.castillo@umayor.cl

Katy Jenkins, Centre for International Development, Dept of Social Sciences – Northumbria University. Correo electrónico: katy.jenkins@northumbria.ac.uk