Critical studies of rural development
In recent decades, the countryside and rural ways of life in Our America have been threatened not only by the expansion of cities and changes in consumption patterns, but mainly by the multiple expressions of capital:
Agro-exporting elites successfully promote greater market integration through Free Trade Agreements and Strategic Partnership Agreements; public and private capital deepens the land grabbing and foreign ownership of lands and territories; growing public debt intensifies dependence on international credit (mostly from China but also from the BNDES, the IDB and the IMF); state and private investments in infrastructure projects link the construction of mega-projects in indigenous and peasant areas with extractive projects, mainly of minerals (precious, industrial and strategic), hydrocarbons (conventional and unconventional), agribusiness and corporate tourism.
In this scenario, those who inhabit the rural territories of Latin America face new forms of violence and exploitation. Both territories and the bodies of men, women, and individuals of other identities—sexual, Indigenous, Black, racialized, and marginalized—constitute a kind of army of disposable externalities of the capitalist system that continually reproduces itself.
However, despite the horror of the violence that occurs daily in these territories, voices of resistance are rising up, offering new ways of understanding, analyzing, and inhabiting rural worlds for the radical transformation of the social, economic, and political reality they experience. While resisting the advances of extractive capital, these communities and social movements—true societies in motion—are (re)creating concrete alternatives to capitalism from their “insurgent territories.”
In this context, from the CLACSO Working Group Critical Studies of Rural Development We propose to adopt investigative perspectives and co-construct knowledge with communities, territories, and sociopolitical actors, in order to share embodied and situated knowledge that allows for an understanding of the advance of capital in their territories. We analyze these scenarios through the lens of intersectionality theory and community, Black, and Indigenous feminisms, which are challenging the epistemology that underpins the capitalist system. Ultimately, we seek to construct alternative ways of understanding the world, to generate other research processes—and relationships with research teams—that prioritize local knowledge, memories, and resistance present in these territories. This will allow us to envision other ways of life, other forms of relating to territories and bodies, beyond capitalism, to contribute to the struggles that, from rural territories, seek not only to change the world, but to build a new world, a world where many worlds fit.
To achieve all this, we propose to work on three complementary axes:
- Thematic axis 1: The transformations of the Latin American and Caribbean agrarian question, the territorial disputes driven by the permanent confrontation between capital and labor, resulting in the formation of a database of the struggles for land and territory in Latin America and the Caribbean.
- Thematic axis 2: Discuss the reconstitution that political subjects have made from the construction of processes of autonomy, resistance and common alternatives and interests with the aim of overcoming the Modern State and assuming total control of the territory through work.
- Cross-cutting theme – Gender relations in the countryside and violence against rural women.
coordinate
Eliud Torres Velázquez
Division of Social Sciences and Humanities
Metropolitan Autonomous University – Xochimilco Unit
Mexico
Angelina Herrera Sorzano
Center for Demographic Studies
Havana Casa Particular |University of Havana
Cuba
Juan Wahren
Gino Germani Research Institute
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Buenos Aires
Argentina
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