Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time: The Luso-Hispanic World Hispanic Issues On Line (original) (raw)

Environmental Cultural Studies as a Transdisciplinary Field: Latin American and Iberian Studies

Environmental Cultural Studies Through Time, 2019

Environmental cultural studies (ECS) searches for a multidimensional understanding of pressing issues that affect human communities, in connection to their material environments. ECS, like cultural studies, researches relationships between power structures and everyday practices of life, but it moves from anthropocentric understanding focusing on all biotic communities and matter. ECS is particularly interested in how semiotic and material processes interact within nature-cultural relations. We look at how culture and politics not only produce natures and environments (at once materially and semiotically), but also at how chemical organic and inorganic substances move through matter, ecosystems, and bodies, affecting the ways people think, act, and organize. This leads us to see that we cannot protect ourselves without protecting nature, and that we cannot protect nature by separating it from ourselves.

Introduction: Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies

A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies, 2023

An exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers expose the costs and contest the assumptions of the Capitalocene era that guides readers through the rapidly developing field of Spanish environmental cultural studies. From the scars left by Franco's dams and mines to the toxic waste dumped in Equatorial Guinea, from the cruelty of the modern pork industry to the ravages of mass tourism in the Balearic Islands, this book delves into the power relations, material practices and social imaginaries underpinning the global economic system to uncover its unaffordable human and non-human costs. Guiding the reader through the rapidly emerging field of Spanish environmental cultural studies, with chapters on such topics as extractivism, animal studies, food studies, ecofeminism, decoloniality, critical race studies, tourism, and waste studies, an international team of US and European scholars show how Spanish writers, artists, and filmmakers have illuminated and contested the growth-oriented and neo-colonialist assumptions of the current Capitalocene era. Focused on Spain, the volume also provides models for exploring the socioecological implications of cultural manifestations in other parts of the world.

Critical Thoughts on Ecosocial Devastation: Latin American Perspectives

Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2024

In this special issue, our focus will be on analyzing the contributions that Latin American thought has made or could make to the socio-ecological problems that currently afflict us. Latin American thought stands out for its epistemic-ecological disruptiveness, which reflects its ability to transform the very way we speak, know, and feel the relationship between humans and more-than-human entities (Alimonda, Toro Pérez, and Martín 2017). Latin American critical perspectives advocate for relational and ecological approaches to knowledge construction, while also revealing the presence of cosmocentric political, economic, historical, and artistic practices that challenge anthropocentric forms, modern dualism, and instrumental reason. These ideologies are responsible for the problematic division between humans and non-humans. The contextual nature of Latin American thought, coupled with its emphasis on relationality as an epistemological principle, fosters productive dialogues with intellectual traditions from various regions (such as Europe, India, or Africa). It enables Latin American perspectives to respond to global eco-social issues in a situated yet impactful manner. At the same time, the theoretical rigor and transformative potential of the Latin American perspective have led authors from the global north to draw on these perspectives to develop sophisticated critical theories and to complexify, for example, understandings of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015 and 2016) or theories of environmental justice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020; Rodríguez and Inturias 2018). We look forward to receiving contributions that explore how Latin American critical perspectives contribute to the ecological shift. To fully grasp the complexity of the socio-ecological crisis and the resulting responses, we eagerly invite theoretical texts that offer conceptual analysis or critical discussions of theoretical proposals. We also welcome empirical analyses, including field research or qualitative/quantitative methodologies, among others. Contributions can be organized around the following thematic axes, without being limited exclusively to them: 1. The utility of diverse non-canonical knowledge traditions in Latin America for addressing the global socio-ecological crisis. 2. Proposals emerging from Latin America within anti/post/decolonial studies, feminist perspectives, and artistic/aesthetic practices as pathways to addressing the socio-ecological crisis. 3. Critical Latin American studies on socio-environmental conflicts, conservation, and environmental preservation in specific territories, conducted through empirical methodologies involving fieldwork and/or engagement with communities. 4. Comparative analysis of contemporary critical approaches from Latin America in the fields of political theory and social theory in response to the challenges posed by the ecological crisis within the realm of social sciences.