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Researcher
Jennifer Casolo
- Research Expertise:A human (and more-than-human) geographer by training, I am committed to the inseparability of research and practice. For me that means walking with, learning from, creating with and through relationships territories, peoples, or movements seeking to make life more possible, as Antonio Gramsci described: "renovating and making critical already existing activities". Having lived and worked lived in Central America for most of the last 35 years, I am presently based in the Ch'orti' Maya borderlands of Eastern Guatemala and Western Honduras. The ways Ch'orti' authorities and activists wrestle with ongoing processes of racialized dispossession, intersectional exclusions, and colonial erasures informs my research practice. My research-action there centres on building of alternative curriculum, indigenous pedagogies and evaluation rooted in Ch'orti' cosmovision but able to draw on, be informed by other knowledges and co-research. Together with other Ch'orti' and non Ch'orti' scholars and activists, we have been commissioned to found the Ch'orti' - Maya and the Institute for Ch'orti' Maya Science and Technology, Upejkna'r e Ja'. These two initiatives serve as tools for the Ch'orti' Council of Ancestral Authorities to make life possible in their territory and work to build youth capabilities for the needs of the territory in ways that revalue ancestral knowledge. This includes the development of alternative pedagogies, curriculum, classes and co-research for the recovery, documentation, renovation and application of indigenous science, technology, history and philosophy related to Western themes of climate justice, political ecology, food sovereignty, legal pluralism, resource governance, and migration. It also entails an FWO Project to think relationally about Indigenous knowledges in two different spaces where green development projects are underway. I have experience in strategic litigation expertise studies for the restitution of communal lands and the defense of environmental defenders. I have also worked on program and project development and evaluation of post hurricane reconstruction, gender justice policies, intercultural dialogue, North-South education initiatives, including the IOB - Nitlapán, Nicaragua Globalized Masters and now presently ICP Connect Blended Masters Communities of Practice. Het omvat ook een FWO-project om relationeel na te denken over inheemse kennis in twee verschillende ruimtes waar groene ontwikkelingsprojecten aan de gang zijn.
- Keywords:POLITICAL ECOLOGY, GOVERNANCE, ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT, FEMINISM, COLONIALISM, GENDER JUSTICE, KNOWLEDGE CREATION, INDIGENOUS SCIENCE, DEVELOPMENT, Political and social sciences
- Disciplines:Radical and critical sociology, feminist studies, Sociology of development, Sociology of knowledge, Economic geography not elsewhere classified, Cultural geography, Political geography, Social geography
- Research techniques:Critical ethnography; relational comparison; co-creation praxis in research and action; community mapping (non GIS); workshop facilitation with adults with little formal education; network analysis of accumulation dynamics in indigenous territories; archival; participatory action research (with reflective critique); auto-ethnography, recovery, documentation and renovation of ancestral knowledge.
- Users of research expertise:Community-based and non-governmental organizations and educational and research institutions seeking to develop or implement transformative, anti-colonial, anti-racist or other justice oriented analyses or practices in relation to gender, indigenous rights, feminisms, climate change, the right to food, local governance, environmental justice, anti-extractivism and plural models of superior education.