From Colonial Extractivism to Hearting and Feelthinking: Reflections on Accompanying Women Territory Defenders in Bolivia

In this article, I explore what a more ethical and decolonial approach to North-South research could look like, reflecting on my experiences of accompanying women territory defenders in Bolivia. I argue that the same colonial extractivist logic that threatens the lives and territories of indigenous and rural women in Abya Yala is also being reproduced in processes of knowledge production in neoliberal academia. Drawing on the critical work of feminist and indigenous scholars from Abya Yala, I propose a relational and embodied methodological approach that I call ‘acompañar’ that has the potential to resist these extractivist tendencies. I conclude that decolonization requires a radical exploration of the researcher’s positionings in ongoing colonial processes and resistance to the temporalities of neoliberal academia.