Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change. The extraordinary move coincided with the rise of neoextractivism, where the self-described socialist President Rafael Correa contended that Buen Vivir could be achieved through controversial mining projects on Indigenous and campesino territories, including their watersheds. Pachamama Politics provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Teresa A. Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement—alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands—to expose the rifts between social movements and the “pink tide” government. When the promise of social change turns to state criminalization of water defenders, Velásquez argues that the contradictions of neoextractivism created the political conditions for campesinos to reconsider their relationship to indigeneity. The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.

Pachamama Politics examines how campesinos came to defend their community water sources from gold mining upstream and explains why Ecuador's "pink tide" government came under fire by Indigenous and environmental rights activists.

Subaltern Geographies is the first book-length discussion addressing the relationship between the historical innovations of subaltern studies and the critical intellectual practices and methodologies of cultural, urban, historical, and political geography. This edited volume explores this relationship by attempting to think critically about space and spatial categorizations. Editors Tariq Jazeel and Stephen Legg ask, What methodological-philosophical potential does a rigorously geographical engagement with the concept of subalternity pose for geographical thought, whether in historical or contemporary contexts? And what types of craft are necessary for us to seek out subaltern perspectives both from the past and in the present? In so doing, Subaltern Geographies engages with the implications for and impact on disciplinary geographical thought of subaltern studies scholarship, as well as the potential for such thought. In the process, it probes new spatial ideas and forms of learning in an attempt to bypass the spatial categorizations of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism.

Throughout the 21st century, various craft practices have drawn the attention of academics and the general public in the West. In Craft is Political, D Wood has gathered a collection of essays to argue that this attention is a direct response to and critique of the particular economic, social and technological contexts in which we live. Just as Ruskin and Morris viewed craft and its ethos in the 1800s as a kind of political opposition to the Industrial Revolution, Wood and her authors contend that current craft activities are politically saturated when perspectives from the Global South, Indigenous ideology and even Western government policy are examined. Craft is Political argues that a holistic perspective on craft, in light of colonialism, post-colonialism, critical race theory and globalisation, is overdue. A great diversity of case studies is included, from craft and design in Turkey and craft markets in New Zealand to Indigenous practitioners in Taiwan and Finnish craft education. Craft is Political brings together authors from a variety of disciplines and nations to consider politicised craft.

Since the re-democratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development seeks to engage with comprehensive, contemporary, and critical theoretical debates on Latin American development. The volume draws on contributions from across the humanities and social sciences and, unlike earlier volumes of this kind, explicitly highlights the disruptions to the field being brought by a range of anti-capitalist, decolonial, feminist, and ontological intellectual contributions. The chapters consider in depth the harms and suffering caused by various oppressive forces, as well as the creative and often revolutionary ways in which ordinary Latin Americans resist, fight back, and work to construct development defined broadly as the struggle for a better and more dignified life. The book covers many key themes including development policy and practice; neoliberalism and its aftermath; the role played by social movements in cities and rural areas; the politics of water, oil, and other environmental resources; indigenous and Afro-descendant rights; and the struggles for gender equality. With contributions from authors working in Latin America, the US and Canada, Europe, and New Zealand at a range of universities and other organizations, the handbook is an invaluable resource for students and teachers in development studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, human geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, and economics, as well as for activists and development practitioners.

This cutting-edge book presents a broad picture of global capitalism and extractivism in contemporary Latin America. Leading scholars examine the cultural patterns involving gender, ethnicity, and class that lie behind protests in opposition to extractivist projects and the contrast in responses from state actors to those movements.