Call For Papers REC 67 (Jan-Jun 2026)
Posted on 2025-12-22CALL FOR PAPERS REC 67 (Jan-Jun 2026)
Women, Ecology, and Conflict: Knowledges, Agencies, and Worlds to Come
Guest Editors:
Giovana Suárez Ortiz, Universidad del Quindío
Valeria Ramírez Durán, Colectivo Raigambre
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2026
Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—
with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with
unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence.
The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of
learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.
(Donna Haraway - Staying with the Trouble)
In Colombia, socio-environmental violence has left deep marks on bodies, territories, and ecologies. War, extractivism, illegal economies, monocultures, river contamination, the deterioration of forests, and the forced transformation of ecosystems have configured ways of life marked by loss, displacement, territorial reconfiguration, and the agencies emerging from these modes of existence. Understanding these experiences demands a reading that goes beyond the human and considers, as Donna Haraway has proposed, the naturecultural networks in which women, rivers, animals, soils, technologies, grief, and affects are deeply intertwined.
These networks are especially visible in Colombia, where the defense of water, mountains, land, and forests has historically fallen upon rural, Afro-descendant, Indigenous, peasant, and urban women. Feminist political ecology reveals that these experiences of harm and struggle are traversed by specific inequalities of gender, class, race, and ethnicity, which determine who accesses resources, who performs care work, who resists, and who is heard (Rocheleau et al., 2004).
These knowledges are expressed in diverse ways: in the defense of the páramos; in the struggle for water in La Guajira and Cauca; in resistance against mining and monocultures in Chocó, Meta, Cesar, or Putumayo; in community weaving of healing and care in territories such as Montes de María or the Pacific region; and in artistic creation and collective actions demanding environmental justice (Ulloa, 2020). Likewise, debates on decolonial listening—such as those proposed by Acosta López—open the possibility of hearing territorial and more-than-human testimonies, whose voices overflow hegemonic frameworks of audibility and legibility (Acosta, 2025).
This special issue is conceived as a space for dialogue between academic research, territorial experiences, artistic practices, and community knowledges. As editors, we have identified lines of work already underway in different regions of the country—from the Pacific and the Caribbean to the Andes, urban territories, and the Amazon—that dialogue with the proposed axes and will allow for the articulation of diverse methodologies, including historical, ethnographic, philosophical, artistic, and pedagogical approaches.
We welcome articles (up to 8000 words), interviews, memory accounts, creative processes, or case studies (up to 4000 words), articulated around the following thematic axes:
I – Ecologies of Armed Conflict in Colombia: Territories, Networks, and Environmental Wounds
We welcome contributions that analyze the ecological impacts of the armed conflict in regions such as the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Amazon, the Orinoquía, the Andes, and urban territories. We are interested in studying how poisoned rivers, razed forests, degraded soils, and displaced animals are part of the history of war in Colombia. Using Haraway’s figurations, these territories can be read as networks of agency, where destruction, memory, mourning, and regeneration are intertwined. In this sense, proposals should contribute to thinking about how communities have organized to create and sustain practices and knowledges arising from vital commitments supported by pedagogical, community, and cosmological practices.
II – Care, Vulnerability, and Agency: Women Facing Extractivism and Environmental Inequality
This axis is situated in concrete struggles: women defending water in Cauca and Huila; environmental leaders at risk in the Caribbean and Catatumbo; peasant women affected by the use of agrotoxins; seed guardians in the Coffee Region; Afro-descendant and Raizal women protecting coastal ecosystems; and Indigenous women sustaining territorial cosmologies. From the perspective of feminist political ecology, we invite examinations of how life and territories are sustained amidst historical inequalities that condition access to land, environmental justice, and political participation. Thus, we are interested in research and narratives regarding community, artistic, scientific, and socio-legal projects that show both the intersections and tensions between actors, interests, discourses, and conceptualizations of the conflict.
III – Situated Knowledges, Environmental Memories, and Humanistic Listening Practices
This axis calls for analyses and experiences that inquire into the environmental memories of war—such as animal massacres, the destruction of rivers, and territorial silencings—as well as practices of listening emerging from communities that narrate environmental harm through human and non-human voices. We explicitly invite contributions from the humanities—including philosophy, history, literary studies, cultural studies, visual arts, cinema, and creative writing—alongside testimonial, pedagogical, and community proposals that construct other ways of making audible that which has been erased, considered minor, or declared inaudible.
IV – Times to Come: Continuity and Possible Worlds
This axis invites proposals that narrate, imagine, or explore the composition of possible times based on local alliances, situated knowledges, and political commitments that sustain life in contexts of socio-environmental damage. Following authors such as Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (2019) and Bruno Latour (2013), we are interested in attending to concrete practices through which different actors, rooted in their vital spaces, make decisions, act, and "speak the world" from the urgency imposed by the gravity of current problems. Thus, this axis allows us to pay attention to forms of creative agency that rehearse continuities and recompositions with the present.
Indicative Bibliography
Acosta López, María del Rosario. 2021. “Aproximaciones est-éticas a la memoria después del trauma”. Calibán. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicología 30: 151-8.
Acosta López, María del Rosario, y Juan Diego Pérez. 2025. “Decolonizing Listening: From Grammars of lo Inaudito to Expansive Onto-Epistemic Thresholds”. In: Knowing Life The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies. Edit by Brianne Donalson. Routledge.
Blackmore y Ponce de León (Eds). (2024). La escuela journal. Nº1 CULTURAS HIDROCOMUNES: 2024 ARTE, PEDAGOGÍA Y PRÁCTICAS DE CUIDADO EN LAS AMÉRICAS
Cielo y Carrión. (2020). La transformación de los territorios de cuidado en el circuito petrolero ecuatoriano. CLACSO.
Cruz y Bayón. Cuerpos, Territorios y Feminismos. Compilación latinoamericana de teorías, metodologías y prácticas políticas.
Comisión de la Verdad. 2022. Cuando los pájaros no cantaban. Historias del conflicto armado en Colombia. Tomo 6. Bogotá: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad.
Despret y Stengers. Las que hacen historias. ¿Qué le hacen las mujeres al pensamiento? Buenos Aires: Hekht.
Danowski y Viveiros de Castro. (2019). ¿Hay mundos por venir? Ensayos sobre los miedos y los fines. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Caja Negra Editora.
Despret, V. (2021). A la salud de los muertos. Relatos de quienes quedan. Buenos Aires: Cactus.
Echeverry Buriticá, Margarita, y Carolina Morales Arias. 2022. “Soy parte de este proceso histórico: sistematización de la experiencia de la implementación de la comisión de la verdad colombiana en el exilio”. Comisión de la Verdad.
Haraway, D. (2004). The Haraway Reader. Routledge New York and London.
_________. (2019). Seguir con el problema. Generar parentesco en el Chthuluceno. Buenos Aires: consonni.
Hernández, Lecomte, Acero. (2024). Cuerpos de agua. Ocho relatos de mujeres del río Magdalena. Colombia: Sello Editorial Museo del Río Magdalena.
Hird, M. (2022). A public sociology of waste. Gran Bretaña: Bristol University Press.
JEP. El ambiente como víctima silenciosa. Un diagnóstico de las afectaciones en el posacuerdo de paz (2017-2022).
JEP. Reflexiones sobre el Enfoque Territorial y Ambiental en la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz.
Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2019). “Imaginando los ríos” en Revista Colombiana de Antropología. (Trad. Alejandro Camargo). Vol. 55 n°1 enero-junio del 2019. pp. 153-166
__________. (2020). “Knowledge Others, Others’ Knowledge: The Need for a New Epistemology of Water” en Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 3 (2): 113–123, July 2020.
Latour (2013). “Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene”. Para el simposio Thinking the Anthropocene en París, 14-15 noviembre, 2013, EHESS-Centre Koyré- Sciences Po.
Obando y Muñoz. (2024). Siete plantas. Historias de la gente sin nombre. Himpar Editores
Plumwood, V. (1991). “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism” en Hypatia vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991)
__________. (1993). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge New York and London.
Restrepo, Eduardo. 2010. Genealogía e impactos (no-intencionados) de las intervenciones de desarrollo en el Chocó: El Proyecto Desarrollo Integral Agrícola Rural (DIAR). Universidad del Cauca/Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH). https://w.ram-wan.net/restrepo/documentos/informe-diar.pdf
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2018. Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Tinta Limón.
Rocheleau et al. (2004) “Género y ambiente: una perspectiva de la ecología política feminista” en Miradas al futuro. Hacia la construcción de sociedades sustentables con equidad de género (Comp. Verónica Vázquez y Margarita Velázquez). Universidad Autónoma de México.
Sañudo, M. (2015). Tierra y género. Dilemas y obstáculos en los procesos de negociación de la política de tierras en Colombia. Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
Shiva y Mies. (1998). La praxis del ecofeminismo. Biotecnología, consumo, reproducción. Icaria editorial, s. a. Barcelona.
Shiva. (2018). Las guerras del agua. Privatización, contaminación y lucro. Grupo editorial siglo veintiuno.
Ulloa, A. (2020). “Ecología política feminista latinoamericana” en Feminismo socioambiental. Revitalizando el debate desde América Latina. Universidad Autónoma de México.