ABSTRACT
Social cartographies have become a common tool in Latin America in the rise of environmental conflicts and territorial struggles. These cartographies introduced a different approach to the ways in which knowledges about the territory and landscapes are produced, becoming tools for marginal communities to contest environmental issues. The colonial legacy in Latin America evidenced by extractivism, environmental conservation models, and land dispossession processes have shaped the appropriation of resources and an understanding of nature that collide, merge, and interweave with communities’ use and ways of seen the world. This chapter engages with these debates, showing the conflicted character of cartographies that support emancipatory struggles to achieve territorial recognition or self-determination but also may impose representational and onto-epistemic models to render territories legible or extractable. I suggest that the myriad landscapes of mapping projects point toward pluriversal cartographies that engage with the inherent contradictions of map making, but also the possibility of representing multiple and becoming worlds, highlighting maps as processes to think and use environment otherwise. Moreover, this expands the scope of social cartographies to confront and assume its inherent contradictions, posing new critical and radical stances to re-think representation, knowledge production, and advance praxes for territorial and environmental justice.
