GGIS Colloquium | Gabriela Valdivia, "Where Thought and Place Are One: Yakui Yachana and the Art of Mapping With Amazonian Places"
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- Geography & GIS
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- Gabriela Valdivia
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- geography@illinois.edu
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- Originating Calendar
- Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)
- Gabriela Valdivia "Where Thought and Place Are One: Yakui Yachana and the Art of Mapping With Amazonian Places." Valdivia is a professor in the Department of Geography at UNC-Chapel Hill and Assistant Dean at Honors Carolina.
Alli puncha, causanguichu. Are you with life, are you living? This talk shares Yakui Yachana, a multi-year collaborative mapping project with Napo Runa peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Part art exhibit, part storytelling, part method for grounded normativity, we ask what becomes possible when we "amazonize" cartography — mapping with, rather than about, Amazonian places. Drawing on participatory workshops with the community of Nuevo Santo Domingo del Río Hollín, we follow hand-drawn maps that hold rivers, forests, and spirits as kin rather than coordinates: maps where vanishing points open onto myth-time, where lines carry ayllu and llacta, or a sense of home, and where being known by a place matters as much as knowing it. We ask not what these drawings show, but where they lead us — and what it might mean to map otherwise, on Amazonian peoples' own terms
Gabriela is a feminist political ecologist examining the relationship between resources and socio-environmental inequities. Her research and teaching focus on how environmental injustices shape everyday life experiences and decisions in the Americas. She is an author of the digital project Crude Entanglements, which explores the affective dimensions of oil production; a co-author of Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia; and a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. She grew up in Peru and conducted ethnographic research in Ecuador and Bolivia, and brings these experiences into her courses on Latin American environments and societies and advanced undergraduate courses on political ecology and global environmental justice.Learn more about Gabriela by visiting her website: https://valdivia.web.unc.edu/.