Traces of dignidad. A critical exploration of women’s resistances in the context of extractivism in the Atacama Desert, Chile

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that expanding our comprehension of women's resistance within extractive contexts requires moving beyond impact-driven and anti-extractive narratives. While following the traces of women mobilising in the Atacama Desert, Chile, this research aims to conceptualise women's territory-based experiences and long-standing resistances concerning everyday life with large-scale mining. Drawing on a feminist and decolonial framework, this research critically explores women's diverse and interwoven experiences, particularly explored through the relational ontology of pluriversidad and articulated through the lens of senti-pensar and cuerpo-territorio. In this analysis, I emphasise the contributions of women's emotional, embodied, and territorial experiences to build situated and contextualised conceptualisations of their territory, their positionalities, and always-evolving resistances within the context of extractivism.

The thesis is based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with a collaborative and participatory intentionality. By focusing on women's oral histories and participatory filmmaking, the research presents three specific arguments. First, it brings attention to women’s place-based imaginaries and representations of territory and breaks with dichotomous and romantic views that align or contrast them with hegemonic extractive representations. Instead, the thesis attempts to comprehend the co-existence of ambivalent conceptualisations rising between women’s diverse ecological, cultural, and extractive territory-imaginaries of the Atacama Desert. Secondly, this analysis provides a deep comprehension of women’s positionalities concerning everyday life with extractivism, arguing the need to extend beyond an impact-driven analysis due to the potential classification, categorisation, or dismissal of their narratives. Ultimately, going beyond the growing literature focusing on women’s resistance to extractivism, this research aims to broaden the analysis based on women’s resistances within contexts of extractivism, arguing that these extend beyond anti-mining narratives.

As a result, this research introduces the perspective of Dignidad, a concept arising from women’s emotional, embodied, and territorial ontologies, thus constituting a fundamental idea through which to make sense of women’s situated and contextualised lived experiences and always-evolving resistances in the Atacama Desert. Therefore, this thesis provides an analytical exploration of women’s traces of dignidad, a perspective that is not static but dynamic and continuously being shaped through the experience of resistance.

Date of Award	27 Jun 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Katy Jenkins (Supervisor)