11/02/22, 15.30h Venue: CEDLA, Roetersstraat 33 | 1018 WB Amsterdam - 2nd Floor Organizador: CEDLA Lecture Poniente: Astrid Ulloa, Universidad Nacional (Colombia) El cambio climático global y los posteriores procesos de mitigación y adaptación son temas que trascienden los contextos locales y requieren la interacción de diferentes conocimientos, ideas y prácticas. Sin embargo, las acciones globales contra el CC han estado sustentadas por un solo tipo de conocimiento. Si bien se han planteado propuestas para la articulación de diversos conocimientos, los intentos de acuerdos interculturales e interdisciplinarios continúan enfrentando problemas de comparación con la ciencia especializada, en términos de indicadores, escalas, formas de sistematización y variables a considerar, especialmente en los procesos de predicción. En este contexto, Prof. Astrid Ulloa argumenta que los conocimientos indígenas, dadas sus ontologías, epistemologías y relaciones culturales de acuerdo con el género, la edad, la especialización y la localización, permiten una comprensión compleja del CC. Son conocimientos que confrontan las políticas global-nacionales para visibilizar los territorios como seres vivos, y los no humanos como seres políticos, y proponer alternativas contextualizadas de acuerdo con procesos históricos y políticos para repensar conceptos, estrategias y políticas frente al cambio climático.

12 September 2021, 15:30-17:00 Venue: CEDLA, Roetersstraat 33 | 1018 WB Amsterdam - 2nd Floor CEDLA Lecture Speaker: Jelke Boesten, King’s College London In 2016, the case known as ‘Sepur Zarco’ saw two military officers convicted for crimes against humanity and sexual and domestic slavery in Guatemala. Following the analysis of Jo-Marie Burt (2019), the case had transformative effects on the victim-survivors as well as on the idea of gender justice more broadly. Considering this remarkable trial and its effects, in this lecture Jelke Boesten asks if criminal justice for conflict related sexual violence can bring about transformative gender justice in Latin America by unpacking ongoing trials in Peru. There, during the counterinsurgency against Shining Path (1980-2000) the military used sexual violence just as systematically as in Guatemala in the 1980s. However, impunity persists. The paper will reflect on the ongoing court case against thirteen ex-military in Peru, known as ‘Manta y Vilca’, to examine whether these difficult processes contribute to what we might call ‘transformative gender justice’ in Latin America.

Financialisation - Displacement - Gentrification SPEAKER: Dr. Michael Janoschka, Senior Lecturer at Universität Leipzig DISCUSSANT: Dr. Femke van Noorloos from Utrecht University DATE: 11 June, 2021 ACTIVITY: CEDLA LECTURE ​ In his lecture Michael Janoschka will discuss how Latin American cities have increasingly been defined by the financialisation of urban development, the gentrification of urban areas and the displacement of vulnerable populations. He will unpack the dominant urban theories and the current debate on city development in order to engage critically with spatial discourses and knowledge production. He proposes to use a de-colonial perspective to develop a more nuanced approach and to provide alternative readings of urban transformation policies and processes in Latin American cities.

Dr. Mónica Moreno Figueroa, University of Cambridge and Prof. Peter Wade, University of Manchester This lecture took place on 9 April 2021 as part of the CEDLA Lecture Series. There has been an incipient turn to antiracism in Latin America. In our research project ‘Latin American Anti-racism in a 'Post-Racial' Age’ (LAPORA) we are looking at different styles of antiracist activity in four countries: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. One of our key findings is the variation in how different organisations understand and use the language of racism and antiracism to define or organise their activities. There are different grammars of antiracism, some explicit some alternative. What could the antiracist effects of these ‘alternative grammars’ of struggle be? Explicit naming of racism per se is not necessarily a sign of advancing antiracist work, however strategic language and awareness of structural racism have distinct advantages for antiracist practice.

Prof. dr. Rutgerd Boelens, Wageningen University & CEDLA - University of Amsterdam This lecture took place on 19 March 2021 as part of the CEDLA Lecture Series. River systems are fundamental for social and natural well-being. Around the world, however, mega-damming, pollution and depletion are putting riverine complexes under great stress. Since ages, engineering of ideal societies by domesticating ‘wild water’ followed utopian imaginaries to control humans and nature at once, while omitting alternative understandings and side-lining local co-governance practices. In Europe, this has a long tradition: “God created the world but the Dutch created the Netherlands”. Spain’s century-old Política Hidráulica envisioned “recreating nature and humans, at once”. Both countries exported their technocratic paradigms to Latin America, but the pendulum may now swing back. Ecuador engrained ‘Rights of Nature’ constitutionally. In Colombia, rivers became subjects, not objects, of moral and legal rights. Increasingly, socio-nature commons fight for revitalizing rivers. European grassroots now seek to creatively translate these notions in their struggles, and partners in South and North join forces, building bottom-up, cross-cultural knowledge. Science and policies, however, lack the tools to engage with these new water justice movements. Through two new international Wageningen / CEDLA-UvA programs, we will study local and transnational “river commoning” languages, values, practices, and strategies. We will examine river complexes from four connected ontologies: River-as-ecosociety; River-as-territory; River-as-subject; and River-as-movement. ​

Mariana Llanos, GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies, Hamburg This lecture took place on 26 February 2021 as part of the CEDLA Lecture Series In this lecture Dr. Mariana Llanos takes a longitudinal view on presidential-term-limit reforms in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa since the third wave of democratization. Many countries in the two regions (re-)introduced term limits as a democratic safeguard against personal rule and power abuses. Since then, term limits have been contested by a plethora of reform attempts. Such reforms are commonly seen as a risk to democracy. Her theoretical and empirical research (together with Charlotte Heyl ) shows that the stability of term-limit rules is more prevalent than expected, but that this stability sometimes masks institutional ineffectiveness in authoritarian regimes. Rule instability induced by frequent reforms can be part of a piecemeal path towards autocratization, but it can also reflect an open-ended tug of war between authoritarian tendencies and democratic resistance. ​

Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education ​ Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, the Barranquilla World Bank Project aimed to expand water supply to the southwestern sector of the city, populated mainly by low-income communities. Anticipating the duration of the works, the project included a short-term solution: it would install fifty public standpipes during the first months of implementation. This talk tells the story of the WB project and the fifty public standpipes - which were never built. Its purpose is to analyse how water/power distributions have been reworked and consolidated, highlighting tensions triggered by the project at the national and local level. It evidences the messiness of electoral politics and the complexity of political parties (their competing interests, and the fact that these changed over time). This is of interest as it focuses on electoral politics, a subject rarely touched by the political ecology literature, where water policies’ implementation is frequently portrayed as a process of imposition of a set of measures by an essentially uniform group of political/economic elites. Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero argues that, throughout the project, different and heterogenous governments, regulatory agencies, political parties, electoral movements, unions, and business groups, engaged in confrontations and negotiations about different imaginations of the city.