EEI SEMINAR: "Expanding the debate on women's motivations for environmental justice: their resistance to mega-mining in Argentina" by Camila Rolando

Title: "Expanding the debate on women's motivations for environmental justice: their resistance to mega-mining in Argentina"

Speaker: Camila Rolando, ICTA-UAB researcher

Day: Wednesday, October 3rd 2018

Time: 12.30h

Room: Z/023

In Argentina, social mobilization against mega-mining is driven by self-organized citizens constituting themselves in Autonomous People’s Assemblies (hereafter AVAs). In the AVAs women are important actors both as members and leaders. In this article we explore women´s motivations for preventively mobilizing, before the mines had started its commercial exploitation. Previous literature on women leading grassroots environmental activism has overly focused on their identities as mothers and roles as caregivers. However, materialist ecofeminism enables to go from individualistic to structural explanations. Interviews were conducted with women members of AVAs from four different Provinces. The results indicate that these women foremost express their attachment to and defense of the territory as the place they inhabit. Their sense of territoriality is an alternative to top-down imposed extractivism and inscribes their struggle in the Latin-American eco-territorial turn. Additionally, they have expressed the multi-layered relationship between the defense of the territory and their reproductive labor. 

Camila Rolando Mazzuca is a PhD candidate at ICTA-UAB and she is part of the Envjustice Project (http://envjustice.org). Her current research focuses on women's mobilization and leadership in mining ecological distribution conflicts in Latin-America and Western Africa, adopting a materialist ecofeminist framework and a feminist political ecology perspective. She holds a Master diploma in Political Sciences and International Relations from SciencesPo Paris and a Master diploma in Human Ecology from Lund University.