220133 Socio- and Biodiversity in Latin America. Peoples and Nature from late 19th Century to the Present (K) (WiSe 2023/2024)

In this course we will explore the biocultural diversity of Latin America from a critical and historical perspective. Colonial dynamics up to current extractivist dynamics have been fundamental processes in the configuration of institutional, social and cultural orders in the region. However, the complexity of the ways in which relations between peoples and nature are managed in Latin America provides us with a key topic for reflection in order to think about the relations that have led us to multiple crises.
The course proposes to review how this colonial structure has generated world orders that dispute the definitions of the human, and also the relations we create with nature. We will also analyze the ways in which social struggles and the relationships of Latin American peoples with nature generate other arrangements and perspectives of worldling.
In the course we will address texts about the complex process about what constitutes the relationship between people and nature. We want to emphasize perspectives that seek to destabilize an idea of modernity, based on the domination and separation of the human from nature. On the contrary, by thinking from a historical perspective about socio-biodiversity in Latin America, the course provides a space for reflection and analysis of the complex global, spatial, social, environmental and political dynamics that constitute the processes that account for the relationships between people and nature, from the 19th century to the present.

Bibliography

Acker, Antoine, Kaltmeier, Olaf y Tittor, Anne (2020). “Nature”. The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas, ed. Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor, Eleonora Rohland, y Daniel Hawkins. London / New York: Routledge, 418–432
Raby, Megan. (2017). American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. University of North Carolina Press.