Maristella Svampa
Day 3: New Perspectives on Climate and Commonality
Keynote 4 – 7 November 2021
Maristella Svampa, Sociologist and writer, Bariloche, Argentina.
Abstract
Pandemic, Socioecological Crisis and Alternative Proposals from the South
We live in a context of exacerbation of the socio-ecological crisis and of the commoditization of nature, which is articulated with a global political regression, not only in the countries of the North but also in the global South. The COVID-19[JW1] pandemic placed problems at the center of the scene that were previously on the periphery, minimized, and/or invisible. On the one hand, it laid bare social, economic, ethnic, and regional inequalities and high levels of wealth concentration, making them more unbearable than ever. On the other hand, the pandemic made visible the link between socio-ecological crisis, models of maldevelopment, and human health. In sum, the pandemic showed the extent to which talking about the Anthropocene or Capitalocene is not only a matter of climate change and global warming, but also of globalization and maldevelopment models. To the extent that COVID-19 also enabled debates about the urgency of ecosocial transition.
Thus, what appeared to be reserved for a few specialists and radical activists entered the public agenda. Comprehensive proposals prepared in previous years were updated in the heat of the pandemic. In my talk, I presented this discussion and the challenges of the ecosocial and intercultural pact from the South. I’m interested in reflecting on its different axes: the care paradigm, the social or redistributive justice agenda, the different edges of the socio-ecological transition agenda, and the autonomy and democracy agenda. For this, I will place particular emphasis on the scope of relational approaches in the society/nature link, associated with social struggles and civilizing alternatives, Indianist perspectives (rights of nature), as well as popular feminisms/ecofeminisms. and feminist economics in Latin America (paradigm of care).
Biography
Maristella Svampa is an Argentine sociologist and writer. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and a PhD in Sociology from the École d’Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
She lives in Dinahuapi, Patagonia, Argentina, and is Senior Researcher at the Conicet (National Center for Scientific and Technical Research), and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de la Plata (province of Buenos Aires). She is the coordinator of the Group of Critical and Interdisciplinary Studies on the Energy Problem and participates at the International Group of Alternative Development.
She received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kónex Award in Sociology (Argentina) in 2006 and 2016. In 2019, she received the National Award in Sociology.
Maristella Svampa has published and lectured in many countries (France, USA, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, England, Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Costa Rica, and Chile, among others).
She works on socioecological crises and socioenvironmental conflicts in Latin America. Among her books are: Maldesarrollo. La Argentina del Extractivismo y el Despojo (Maldevelopment), (2014); Debates Latinoamericanos. Indianismo, Desarrollo, Dependencia, Populismo (Latin American Debates: Indianism, Development, Dependency, Populism), (2016). In English, she has published Development in Latin America, Challenges, Resistances, Future, Fernwood Publishing: Canada (2019) and Neo-Extractivism Dynamics in Latin America, Socioenvironmental Conflicts, Territorial Turn, and New Political Narratives, Elements: Cambridge University Press, USA (2019).
She has published novels. Her latest book is El Colapso Ecológico ya Llegó. Una Brújula para Salir del Maldesarrollo, 2020 (The ecological collapse is here. A compass to get out of maldevelopment).