Laura Rodriguez Castro's research while affiliated with Deakin University and other places
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Publications (30)
El despojo territorial vinculado a las prácticas extractivas puede rastrearse a la colonización de Abya Yala. Partiendo de un compromiso decolonial, en este artículo problematizo las nociones de despojo y extractivismo como una consecuencia meramente de la guerra en Colombia y narro su presencia en los territorios de las mujeres campesinas. Con bas...
In nations where colonialism persists such as Australia, scholars have identified the hegemony of a morally infused white farming imaginary. While this construction has traditionally been invested in heteropatriarchal ideologies our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how, in recent years, white middle-class farming women have been woven into this...
‘Art’ and ‘memory’ are prominent areas of inquiry in geographical research. Artistic and memory work often overlap in our studies through practices and processes aimed at bringing people together in experimental, affective, and collective ways. In this introduction to the special issue, we write collectively as 12 authors to reflect on the historie...
The Colombian peace process with the insurgent group FARC-EP has been characterized by a lack of compliance and the politicization of peace and memory including the work of sites of memory and peace. Through complicating the European-focused concept of difficult heritage, this article presents the interventions of three museum curators and/or direc...
It is widely understood that climate change transforms rural communities’ economic activities that have historically relied on farming through off-farm income for economic stability and mitigation. Entrepreneurship has become a central feature of the diversification of rural labor, but there is still a need to document how rural women operationaliz...
Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloni...
In reflecting on the last two decades of publications by Australian rural studies scholars in three major disciplinary journals, this article argues that the field of Australian rural sociology has failed to address racial inequality and class difference. While we note a burgeoning of feminist rural research challenging the historical emphasis on t...
This article narrates the affects and experiences of the CaiRollers, the first and only roller derby team in Egypt. Through visual affective discourse analysis of their Instagram account and interviews with team members, the article addresses the question: What do physical practices such as roller derby ‘do’ in e/affecting and mobilising change? In...
This book draws on participatory ethnographic research to understand how rural Colombian women work to dismantle the coloniality of power. It critically examines the ways in which colonial feminisms have homogenized the "category of woman,” ignoring the intersecting relationship of class, race, and gender, thereby excluding the voices of “subaltern...
This chapter provides an overview of the book’s core aims and critiques. I begin by presenting the rationale for the projects undertaken in Colombia and its relation to the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP). This discussion also includes a personal rationale for engaging with decolonial projects. In this respect it foregrounds my positionality as a vi...
This chapter details my own journey and reflections on unlearning in order to learn other worlds through veredeando, forging dialogues and feeling-thinking with Campesinas and social leaders in Colombia. It starts with a discussion of my own privilege as an urban mestiza from Abya Yala working WITH rural women in Colombia. I take a socio-historic,...
This chapter presents Campesina women’s body-land experiences in Colombia. It addresses the main questions of how rural women in Colombia experience violences in their territories and body-lands? And how coloniality manifests in place? Drawing from an understanding of violence as embodied, epistemic and experienced in a continuum, I illustrate how...
This concluding chapter presents a summary of the main arguments of the book emphasising on a compromiso sentipensante and the epistemic forces of place. These include detailing territorial struggles, addressing autonomy claims, dismantling colonial feminisms and supporting the peace process in Colombia. In this chapter, I also point to the need fo...
This chapter presents Colombian rural women’s subversive voices through dialogues with leaders of seventeen social movements and organisations across the country. These testimonies are foregrounded in the context of an important historical moment in the nation’s history—the government’s signature and implementation of the peace agreement with the F...
This chapter presents the conceptual–epistemic–methodological context for the book based on the work of decolonial and communitarian feminisms from Latin America. I demonstrate how decolonial and communitarian feminists seek to dismantle the perspectives of progress and well-being embedded in modernity and coloniality, and enact other worlds throug...
This chapter focuses on Colombian Campesinas’ politics of place. By outlining the vexed nature of different places where Campesinas spend their everyday lives, such as the home and the vereda, this chapter contributes to place-based and politically engaged understandings of women’s experiences, insurgencies and negotiations. I question disempowerin...
This article contributes to critical heritage debates through exploring the politics of memory in the Colombian peace process with the left-wing guerrilla group FARC-EP. Following the signature of the Peace Accord in 2016 with the FARC-EP, the current right-wing government’s (2018–2022) denialist politics have resulted in a lack of compliance of th...
Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an Australian study on redesigning and delivering an introductory sociology course using a combination of such model...
This article adds to a growing body of literature that engages with failure as a way of knowing and understanding the social. Through a focus on images of sportswomen’s loss or failure in three Australian newspapers during the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games we analyzed affective-discourses and patterns in images and accompanying headlines, capt...
Individualized, maternalist and marketized discourses of childcare are pervasive in Australia as they are in other liberal welfare states. Responsibility is overwhelmingly placed on mothers to carry out most childcare work themselves or to arrange informal or paid childcare. One of the key tasks for most employed mothers is transporting children al...
In this article, I use Lorena Cabnal’s notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra to analyse seventeen in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia . In the interviews, social leaders condemn violence that is epistemic, systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how the...
This article traces stories of singular footsteps taken on a collective meandering through Brisbane city, as a pedagogical experiment in writing for geographers. The diverse encounters recounted here took place as part of an extended workshop on the topic of light, beginning with an afternoon discussion, and ending in an evening walk through the il...
In this article we analyze images of sportswomen from four media outlets over the course of the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in Australia. Through visual discourse analysis we find that despite structural changes to increase gender equality at the Commonwealth Games—which for the first time ensured equal opportunities for men and women to win...
What is an appropriate structure for reporting on a de(s)colonial feeling-thinking research project?
This paper contributes to conceptualisations of the countryside as an embodied space through a reflective engagement with the use of participatory methods with the campesinas (peasant women) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in Colombia. The key aim of the paper is to explore how the embodied everyday experiences of the field and t...
This article utilises a gender lens to consider the notion of the ‘global countryside’ through a case study with four peasant Colombian women living in the mountain town of Toca, Boyacá. In seeking a bottom-up understanding of rural globalisation, as it is experienced in the everyday lives of peasant women in Colombia, we drew on a methodology that...
Citations
... Ce réseau social permet de poster et visionner librement du contenu audiovisuel de durée très variable. Il est ainsi devenu un moyen efficace pour partager ou apprendre des pratiques, tel que le bricolage, qui ne sont pas standardisées, avec un accès sur-mesure à l'information (Casey et al. 2022). De plus, la simplification de production de contenus audiovisuels, notamment par l'ample disponibilité à des smartphones dotés de caméra et microphone, a permis à une nouvelle génération > #Numéro 6 d'agriculteurs passionnés connectés (les agri-youtubeurs) d'atteindre un réel succès sur les réseaux sociaux (Bentley et al. 2019 ;Rénier 2022 ;Rénier et al. 2022). ...
... African feminists argue that this is, in no small part, due to a binary understanding of gender in isolation to other social identities, such as race and ethnicity, and that is alien to local cosmologies and practices (Tamale, 2020;Hudson, 2021). In turn, this binary understanding is reflected in the colonial and neoliberal division of labour, and its ongoing logics of dispossession and extraction, present in national land reform programmes in the aftermath of conflict (Rodriguez Castro, 2021). ...
... These portrayals of place enable rural places to be persistently positioned on the periphery of public and political debates. In addition, the placedeterminant effects of global forces on rural places and the different needs of rural people and communities are largely ignored or approached paternalistically by national policymakers (Malatzky and Smith 2022;Pini, Rodriguez Castro, and Mayes 2021). A common technique involved in the process of relegating the rural from broader political attention and controlling how rural matters are considered is the ongoing construction and treatment of rural places as homogeneous. ...
Reference: The Power in Rural Place Stigma
... In previous work, I have written about the ways in which roller derby was said to "save our souls", providing a saviour to those who "discover" the sport. This notion of roller derby being a site of deep transformation for those who participate continued to emerge as I talked to women in different national contexts, including Egypt and China (Pavlidis, 2018;Pavlidis & O'Brien, 2017;Rodriguez Castro et al., 2021). Yet at the same time I heardboth firsthand in interviews and also more publicly in open letters and public statements by notable derby skaters (e.g., Atlanta Roller Derby, 2020)about issues of racism and bullying and power struggles that left women, nonbinary and trans skaters defeated, excluded and isolated from the derby community. ...
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... That means that impact-in-process is also a form of critical and decolonised (un)learning, where the researcher reflects on their positionality. That means reflecting on oneself in relation to the research process and participants, and critically examining the power relations at play from the beginning of the process up to the interpretation and dissemination of the co-produced knowledge (Rodriguez Castro, 2021;Sultana, 2007Sultana, , 2019. Therefore, in both research projects it was not only the research participants who would share their experiences and understanding of issues important to them and learn from others. ...
... Even these young women were burdened with the view that they will have to negotiate their careers for their child-rearing responsibilities (Maddrell et al., 2016). Whilst the notion of a 'good mother' has shifted to include the expectation that mothers should be in employment (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2016;McDowell et al., 2006), if mothers decide to pursue their careers they are often faced with feelings of guilt (Castro et al., 2020). This perception is significant in young women because these negative societal prejudices of working mothers can cause them to think that having a career alongside a family is too difficult, and thus can deter them from ambitious career aspirations (Powell & Butterfield, 2013). ...
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... In Guatemala, for instance, women from the mountains of Xalapán stood up against mining by linking daily struggles to defend land with the defense of their bodies as the first "territory" threatened by the capitalist-patriarchal development model. They developed the concept of Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra 2 (Cabnal, 2010) which has caught the attention of scholars in recent years (Caretta et al., 2020;Rodríguez Castro, 2020;Zaragocin & Caretta, 2020). ...
... Beyond the special issue on the Global South, several more recent studies continued to build upon the works of Bruce, Toffoletti, Thorpe, and others to challenge neoliberal feminist discourses. The central arguments problematize the individualistic notions of "choice," "freedom," and "empowerment," whereby sport and media organizations celebrate achievements in "gender equality," while relying on sportswomen's athletic labor to address inequalities (Pavlidis et al., 2020;Rahikainen & Toffoletti, 2021). Further, gendered neoliberalism is also pertinent in the work of women who work in sports journalism, as evidenced in Coche's (2021) study with Ghanian journalists covering international sport in ways that challenge Western feminist logics. ...
... Recently, social and cultural geographers have developed how technologies are involved in producing an 'expanded unconscious realm of operation' (Dixon & Whitehead, 2008, p. 609), particularly in terms of urban advertising (Dekeyser, 2018), digital automation (Bissell, 2018), and through sensuous techniques and technologies of light (Zhang et al., 2019), scent (Kitson & McHugh, 2019) and sound (Duffy & Waitt, 2013). What this research mobilises is new ways of understanding how technologies participate in processes of 'thinking' in excess of the human, which includes the role of nonhuman matter as memory supports (Horton & Kraftl, 2012), nootropic modifications of the self (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013), or the micropolitical work of habits in the constitution of agile movement (Dewsbury, 2015). ...
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... Here, it is also important to make my positionality visible as a middle-class white-mestiza who grew up in Bogotá and accessed higher education, which I have addressed broadly in other work (Rodriguez Castro, 2018a, 2018b. As I spent time with Colombian Campesinas in Toca and the Sierra, and listened to women's accounts of resistance and sovereignty from their own cosmovisions, I questioned my positionality and privileges. ...
