Destabilising geographies in Colombia: Trajectories and perspectives

Abstract

Colombia has recently witnessed the emergence of new geographies, which opens new scenarios of analysis and political contexts leading to a better understanding of the multiplicity of humans–non‐humans and their territories, territorialities and their rights. These geographies enter dialogue with other disciplinary trajectories and Indigenous and Afro‐descendant perspectives. These new perspectives also interact with critical, feminist and decolonial geographies. These encounters have led to the arrival of new approaches, which I call destabilising geographies. The proposals positioned from these new perspectives look to decolonise the founding binary categories of geography. They are perspectives and proposals that destabilise institutionalised visions of geography because they emerge with and from social processes and movements that require political spaces and the recognition of territorial and environmental rights. These geographies propose an opening to other ontologies and epistemologies that contribute to the complexity of the categories of territory, body‐territory, human–non‐human territories, the political and the collective. They also reveal the racial territorial processes of extractive dynamics and armed conflict. In this text, I develop the following emergences: dissident feminist geographies, geographies of racialised extractivism, Black geographies and Indigenous relational spatialities. These reflections are based on my experience of over 16 years of teaching in the geography programme at Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…Ulloa's (2022) exploration of destabilising geographies in Colombia resonates with de Lira's (2023) unravelling of Brazilian geography's colonial legacies. These contributions exemplify a broader shift in geographical thought towards recognising non‐Western voices and decolonising geographical knowledge production.…”

“…Ulloa's (2022) paper formed part of the ‘Geography in the World’ themed intervention (McFarlane, 2022). While making it clear that they are not speaking on behalf of Colombian geographers, Ulloa draws on almost two decades of experience in higher education to concisely reveal an emerging approach to critical geographies in Colombia.…”

“…Ulloa terms this approach ‘destabilising geographies’ and explains how it is the outcome of dialogue within and between an array of epistemological and ontological perspectives, with a notable emphasis on the importance of amplifying insights from Indigenous and Afro‐descendant communities. The paper outlines the potential of destabilising geographies as a praxis that ‘articulates intersectional, anti‐racist, anti‐violence and anti‐capitalist demands’ (Ulloa, 2022, p. 2), and which offers fresh perspectives for understanding human–non‐human interactions. Destabilising geographies does this via four related themes or lenses, namely: dissident feminist geographies, geographies of racialised extractivism, Black geographies, and Indigenous relational spatialities.…”

“…These themes are present in recent work on extractive logics (e.g., Çaylı, 2021; Murrey & Mollett, 2023). For critical geographers especially, but geographers more broadly, these four themes are argued to be significant at a disciplinary level because they help to ‘reveal the absences that have marked the production of institutional geography and allow new theoretical and methodological critical proposals’ (Ulloa, 2022, p. 5). Furthermore, and uniquely for a paper in Transactions , Ulloa concludes by showing how destabilising geographies is not only a research agenda, but an approach that can and should contribute to political movements and inform Geography curricula by rethinking core categories and concepts.…”

Geography in the world part 2: Editorial

“…Part of the answer to this question might lie in learning from the experience of colleagues in other contexts, including the stories Ulloa (2022) shares from Colombia and those Filippo Celata and Francesca Governa (2024) recover from Italy. The accounts in this collection, and indeed in Part 1 of Geography in the World , offer a focus on not just the epistemic and theoretical stakes of these conversations, but their important institutional and political dimensions too.…”