Territorialising Space in Latin America: Processes and Perceptions

The vision of this book is to bring together examples of grounded geographic research carried out in Latin America regarding territorial processes. These encompass a range of histories, processes, strategies and mechanisms, with case studies from ten countries and many regions: struggles to reclaim indigenous lands, conflicts over land/resource/environmental services, competing land claims, urban territorial identities, state power strategies, commercial involvements and others. The case studies included in the book represent a wide diversity of theoretical and methodological framings currently deployed in Latin America to help interpret the patterns and processes through the conceptual lenses of territory, territoriality and territorialization. Interrogating the meanings of territory introduces multiple spatial, socio-cultural and political concepts including space, place and landscape, power, control and governance, and identity and gender.

Michael K. McCall: Senior researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico.

Michael McCall studied at Bristol and Northwestern universities. He worked in ITC (University of Twente) for many years, in the University of Dar es Salaam, and in Sri Lanka. He is a social geographer engaged in Mexico and Latin America and previously in Eastern & Southern Africa. His primary research and teaching experiences are in participatory cartography of rural and urban local spatial knowledge with emphases on participatory spatial planning, territoriality, community initiatives, risks and vulnerability, and environmental management.

Andrew Boni Noguez: Associate professor, División de Ingenierías, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico.     

Andrew Boni Noguez is a geographer from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research has mainlyfocused on the geography of conflicts between communities and extractive industries and other aspects of mining in Mexico, such as mineral extraction in natural protected areas and the social implications of open pit mining. He teaches in the Geography and Geomatic Engineering programs.

Brian M. Napoletano: Assistant researcher, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Morelia, Mexico.        

Brian M. Napoletano studied biogeography at Michigan State University and Purdue University, but has since shifted his focus to the geographical dimensions of the metabolic rift, including alienation and territorial dispossession associated with capitalist urbanisation, conservation, resource extraction and other major land-change processes in the Global South. He has recently become interested in the possibilities of autogestion and successful co-revolutionary mobilisation by the world and environmental proletariat to forge a hegemonic alternative to capital’s alienated mode of social-metabolic control.

Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez: Ph.D. candidate in Geography, Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Morelia, Mexico.

Tyanif Rico-Rodríguez is a sociologist with Masters’ degrees in Social Sciences and Agrarian Studies. Her research interests are in territorial conflicts, place-based strategies for territorial development and environmental governance. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography and her current project explores governance scenarios on local knowledge based on territorial relations of care among human and non-humans in the coffee landscapes in Nariño, Colombia.