Poner la vida en el centro: Centering Social Reproduction in Agrarian Studies and Politics

The Geography and the Environment Colloquium Series

with Diana Ojeda, Professor, Department of Geography and Department of International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington

Land is at the core of political organizing, demands for justice and reparation, and everyday struggles for territorial and environmental defense around the world. Historical efforts towards making the world a more just and viable place for all have been based on forms of relationship to land other than the predominant capitalist, patriarchal, racist, and colonial productions of land as property, parcel, or resource.

Despite this, and with few exceptions, studies of agrarian capitalism and the multiple forms in which it is constantly contested have not considered the sphere of social reproduction. In this talk, Diana Ojeda centers social reproduction in the analysis of current and pressing agrarian transformations.

From Ojeda's research experience in the Colombian Caribbean and inspired by feminist geography, feminist political ecology, and Latin American traditions of thought, she turns the attention to the ways in which practices, relations and sites of social reproduction constitute the basis for a common political horizon, one that centers life in agrarian studies and politics.

Diana Ojeda is a Colombian geographer working at the intersection of feminist political ecology , critical agrarian studies and political geography. Her research examines historical processes of gendered and racialized dispossession in the Colombian Caribbean, particularly in relation to environmental conservation, ecotourism, and climate change mitigation and adaptation projects. She is a professor in the Department of Geography and the Department of International Studies, and director of the Ostrom Workshop’s Commons Program at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the editor of Antipode. 

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