mtBB
I have been fascinated by knowledge from a very young age. As the child of a primary school teacher and having siblings of different ages, learning used to be one of my favourite activities. And it still is. So much so that I have devoted more than half of my life to the pursuit of knowledge through formal study. The other half has been spent experimenting, teaching and learning through lived experience.
And in this journey, one of the greatest gifts I have received is to embrace the relational, processual, unfinished and situated aspects of knowledge building and sharing.
Being a researcher for me is a constant exercise in using my curiosity, analytical and creative skills to find and promote alternative, diverse and integrated ways for us humans to live as nature. And even when this purpose was still not clear to me, my academic choices and projects brought me closer to myself.
Projects
Affective atmospheres of care in community gardens
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
From a feminist approach, I explored in my PhD the nuances of CGs in promoting more horizontal spatial relations between multiple actors, attentive to the more-than-human agency, and that go beyond gender. I applied qualitative methods, in particular more-than-representational ones, to unpack how these relations co-create affective atmospheres that help us challenge Cartesian binaries.
Being migrants in urban agriculture initiatives
Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
The collaborative work of three Latine scholars (and friends) resulted in an autoethnographic project to understand and share the challenges that we faced, as femme-presenting people of colour, while volunteering in urban agriculture initiatives in NZ. From a critical race theory lens, we applied counterstorytelling and embodied methods to name, process and unpack our challenges as migrants and the multiscalarity of discriminatory practices.
Suma qamaña (buen vivir) and neoextratctivism in Bolivia
Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure, Bolivia
The case study of the conflict in the Indigenous Territory and National Park Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS), in lowland Bolivia, illustrates the contradictions between indigenous and environmentalist rhetoric from Evo Morales’ government and his neoextractive national politics. Using a post-colonial framework, I investigated the clash between two opposite conceptions of socioeconomic organization: one based on the maintenance of extractive capitalism; and the other proposing a break with this secular practice, based on the buen vivir, an Andean Indigenous ontology that understands the relationships within nature as cyclical, cooperative and non-hierarchical.