Protecting Rivers, Maps, and Dreams Book Project
My current book project, “Protecting Rivers, Maps, and Dreams” examines a decade of collaborative intercultural and interdisciplinary research on water and sovereignty in the Willimapu, southern Chile. Water is a site of political contests over sovereignty around the world. This book project frames these contests as water sovereignties, specifically focusing on how ontological claims are shaping these political debates. The Rivers Still Breathe is an ethnography of Indigenous struggles for environmental justice to protect and heal waters. Dreams, rains, and colonizations clash in the remaining biodiverse temperate rainforest mountains of the Willimapu, southern Chile. I explore three tensions related to: 1) dispossession and Indigenous resurgence; 2) Chile’s green state aspirations and its enduring neoliberal legacy; and 3) what constitutes science in current contestations. The book draws from a decade of ethnographic and community-based participatory research guided by Mapuche-Williche ancestral communities. Williche territory is positioned on what I call the hydro-extractive frontier – where capitalism uses water extraction and perpetuates ecological imperialism in the Global South. This creates slow disasters. In the book I tell stories about how and why long-term, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research guided by local people is needed to respond to climate crises. And, why market systems must be transformed to make environmental justice possible. Despite the ongoing challenges of settler colonialism, Indigenous-led efforts to know water embody sovereignties that open alternative futures.
Research Projects:
Intercultural Water Transects
Longitudinal intercultural community science project.
I am a co-founder and collaborating scientist in the Epulafkenmapu Collective, which has been working since 2020 and began a new phase of community monitoring in 2023.
Legal Geographies for Transnational Environmental Justice
Collaborating in Solidarity Networks for Justice and writing expert legal reports. Click on PDF to read 2021 article in JLAG, an accepted article in Climate and Development is forthcoming in 2024.
Participatory Mapmaking Tools for Just Futures
During the pandemic,I joined a collaborative mapping project between independent journalism collective, Mapuexpress, and the Center for Integrated Management of Disaster Risks (CIGIDEN) to create open source map tools for disasters. This is a line of work she plans to expand with different teams in the future.
