Cuerpo-Territorio. Lessons Learnt on a Method to Study Embodied Emotions

Abstract

Qualitative researchers have strived to recenter epistemic authority and knowledge creation by increasingly engaging with Indigenous methodologies. Such effort is fundamental to decolonizing research i.e., putting the research participant in the position of the knower and facilitating the emergence of their knowledge through methods aligned with their ontoepistemology. In this paper, we introduce the method of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) to the wider social science Anglophone qualitative research milieu and join the conversation regarding the centrality of emotions in research. Cuerpo-territorio is a method for qualitative research centered on emotional and embodied responses to environmental change, developed by Latin American communitarian feminists and collectives. It is grounded in the ontological understanding that what happens to the environment is reflected and experienced in one’s body. In this article, we draw on original material from two case studies in Oña and Nabón, Ecuador and Xolobeni, South Africa, where local communities are involved in resisting the threat of impending mining projects. We reflect on the lessons we have learnt through applying cuerpo-territorio, particularly in relation to participants’ time availability and discomfort in drawing and linking the body and the territory to strengthen the method and enhance its broader application. We learnt that we cannot assume that participants will be fully able to appreciate its value and lend their time to it. In ideal circumstances, having time to properly deploy the method, leaving space for plenty of participants’ reflections, avoids instrumentalizing the method as purely a data-gathering tool and opens the possibility of rupturing it and making it their own for participants and researchers alike. Realizing when these circumstances are not present and adjusting the course of our projects is a fundamental part of our work of reflexivity as scholars.

Introduction

Scholars whose work focuses on environmental change have long known that deteriorating conditions, changing landscapes, and sudden or slow onset disasters do not only have practical and financial implications for affected populations, but also result in emotional and embodied impacts (e.g. Baxter & Eyles, 1999). Along the same lines, in the last decade, qualitative researchers have strived to recenter epistemic authority and knowledge in research by increasingly engaging with Indigenous methodologies (e.g. Ortega et al., 2023; Quinn, 2022). Such effort is a fundamental component of a general push within qualitative research towards decolonization i.e., putting the research participant in the position of the knower and facilitating the emergence of their knowledge through methods that are aligned with their ontoepistemology (e.g. Bessarab & Ng’Andu, 2010; Wanjunagalin & Thompson, 2023; Warbrick et al., 2025). Previously, departing from a Western ontological standpoint, researchers tried to gather data about the emotional and embodied experiences of environmental impacts through traditional qualitative methods, such as interviews, sometimes walking alongside participants, and focus groups (e.g. Propst et al., 2008). These methodological choices, however, have shown limitations, as participants might not feel at ease disclosing the sadness, anger, depression, and anxiety they have felt through their body when, for instance, an industry has destroyed their surroundings to a researcher they have just met (see e.g. Lund, 2012). We, the authors, have faced this frustration when, through our research, we have realized that participants were uncomfortable opening up about their embodied feelings of loss and anger due to ongoing environmental change in their communities, while we also were at a loss about how to get a better understanding of their lived experience that encompassed so much more than material changes (Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021; see also Walton et al., 2022). These limitations are particularly frustrating when conducting participatory and feminist research that is aimed at supporting local communities in their awareness-raising or policy-building efforts (Klöckner, 2015). We therefore purposefully turned to decolonizing methodologies as a tangible way to meet participants on their own terms and facilitate the process of knowledge sharing through ontologies that they could relate to, as opposed to bringing in Western methods that could have felt like an imposition (see also Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021; Udah, 2024).

Having carried out collaborative research in Ecuador since 2017, we started employing an autochthonous method and concept that communities we were working with could relatively easily engaged with: cuerpo-territorio. Translated into English as body-territory, the method originates from Latin American communitarian feminist activist and scholarly circles and departs from an ontology whereby the body and the territory are one (Cabnal, 2010; Colectiva Miradas Criticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo, 2017a; Guzmán, 2014). We intentionally keep the term cuerpo-territorio in Spanish as a decolonial choice that respects the knowledge traditions of non-Anglophone, Global South scholarship and its significance in today’s critical geographies of translation (Zaragocin, 2024). This method facilitates research on the environment e.g. degradation, pollution, and change as experienced through the body. As opposed to body mapping, which is most used in social work and health research (e.g. Klein & Milner, 2019; Naidoo et al., 2021; Rieger et al., 2022), cuerpo-territorio has an explicit environmental dimension. This method has been trans-localized as it is grounded on a non-Western ontology and originates from the Global South and is currently being taken up also by scholars in the Global North, particularly in Anglophone and Spanish geography and anthropology (e.g. Berman-Arévalo, 2023; Glockner et al., 2024; Guzmán, 2024; Martinez, 2025; Moreno & Montenegro, 2021; Satizábal & Melo Zurita, 2021). Having employed the method in several research projects, we have learnt how useful it is to generate meaningful discussions with participants and to put them at ease to share their feelings in relation to traumatic or difficult changes they have experienced in their community (e.g. Hood et al., 2025; Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021). Given its workshop setting, whereby participants are asked to draw a figurine and reflect on where on the body they feel emotions related to the changes that have occurred, cuerpo-territorio has proven as a valuable method to gather both visual and voice data in a way that is potentially less intimidating and intrusive than an interview. Additionally, it has served to decolonize research and promote epistemic resistance and justice by bringing forth evidence which participants, often from marginalized communities, can use in their advocacy work (e.g. Hood et al., 2025; Sippel & Ucelo Jiménez, 2025).

Having engaged with the method in different settings, in this paper we reflect on the lessons we have learned through applying cuerpo-territorio. We do this by bringing in original data from a three-year research project on women’s resistance against mining in Ecuador and South Africa. Global South scholars have warned on the risk of cuerpo-territorio becoming an empty signifier when it has ceased to create methodological and epistemological disruptions (Ulloa & Zaragocin, 2022). We contribute to incipient literature and discussions in the Global South and North regarding how cuerpo-territorio has travelled in different spaces and engage with reflections on how we have engaged with it methodologically. There is much excitement around this method (e.g. Berman-Arévalo, 2023; Glockner et al., 2024; Guzmán, 2024; Martinez, 2025; Moreno & Montenegro, 2021; Satizábal & Melo Zurita, 2021; Whitson et al., 2025) which we applaud given the need to center Global South knowledge production, however, understanding when a method and methodology is faced with challenges is just as relevant as highlighting its successful applications. Part of assuring that cuerpo-territorio continues to create discomfort is acknowledging when and how cuerpo-territorio needs to be adapted to different circumstances. This serves the purpose of building our collective methodological skills as researchers seeking to contribute to non-oppressive research - with rather than on people. By bringing this method to the wider social science Anglophone qualitative research milieu, we join the conversation regarding the centrality of emotions in research (see e.g. Hordge-Freeman, 2018; Rosales & Babri, 2023) and the importance of researchers’ self-reflexivity for sharing methodological lessons learned (Hare, 2020; Hedican, 2006). Additionally, we contribute to highlighting the value of relational Indigenous grounded methods (see e.g. Peltier, 2018) by expanding the decolonial methodological toolkit of fellow researchers.

Cuerpo-Territorio in Practice

Cuerpo-territorio is both a concept and a method (Zaragocin & Caretta, 2021). As a concept, it is grounded in Indigenous communitarian feminisms from Abya Yala ¹ , which emphasize the inseparability of body and territory (Cabnal, 2010). In simple terms, it helps map onto the body the impacts and changes that participants have seen and experienced taking place in their surroundings. By doing this, it manifests the ontological indivisibility between the body and the environment that undergirds several Latin America populations’ feel-think (sentipensar see Fals-Borda & Moncayo, 2009; Pinto de Carvalho et al., 2025). As a method, cuerpo-territorio has been developed by several collectives—including Miradas Feministas del Territorio desde el Feminismo, GeoBrujas, and others—who focus on its application in workshops and activist settings concerning the defense of territory from feminist perspectives (see e.g. Cruz Hernandez and Bayon Jimenez, 2022). However, understanding cuerpo-territorio as either a method or a concept, or both is itself a contested move. The very act of dividing cuerpo-territorio into categories such as concept, method, or methodology reflects a Western epistemology and risks reproducing colonial logics by imposing boundaries on knowledges that emerge from relational and lived epistemologies (Jakubchik-Paloheimo & Buena Esperanza, 2024; Ulloa & Zaragocin, 2022). In this paper, we reflect on cuerpo-territorio as method that follows Latin American decolonial feminist methodological and epistemological frameworks. Meaning that the method follows certain principles of knowledge construction like those proposed in feminist geographies in Latin America (Silva et al., 2020) and Latin American decolonial philosophy of knowledge construction (Harding & Mendoza, 2020). These approaches call for knowledge construction that critically examines the coloniality of gender implicit in Western feminist methodologies and epistemologies (Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014). Consequently, much of the scholarship on cuerpo-territorio as a method positions it as an explicitly decolonial approach (Macal, 2024).

As a method, cuerpo-territorio aims to invert traditional forms of social cartography, which typically seeks to map people onto places and spaces (e.g. González Canché, 2025). Instead, this method maps places and spatial dynamics onto people’s bodies. While there are variations in how cuerpo-territorio is applied—depending on the context and the specific research questions—there are several key characteristics that define its practice. First and foremost is an emphasis on embodiment. The body is treated as the first and most vital territory, serving as the center of the spatial analysis. Cuerpo-territorio is a visual method and, as in other methodologies geared towards Indigenous or marginalized populations, it relies on drawings made by research participants (Beauregard et al., 2017; Brown, 2023; Neuville & Pfiffner, 2019). Participants are invited to draw a body that represents themselves or the subject at hand. Having participants making the depiction themselves is the first step of enacting this methodology in a decolonial way, i.e. without the imposition of what an outsider Western researcher might envision as a body. Guided by a facilitator, participants are then asked a series of questions related to a specific phenomenon—such as mining, migration, or gender-based violence—and are encouraged to map the experience or the phenomenon onto the body. For example, in a workshop focused on water pollution and environmental change change, participants are asked where they feel those impacts on their bodies and what places or experiences come to mind in relation to those embodied feelings (Hood et al., 2025). Second, is the role of emotions as an entry point for understanding where and how specific phenomena are experienced on the body. Although this method relies on the intrinsic limitations of engaging with able-bodied and, particularly, not visually impaired participants (for further reflections on this issue see Heath, 2025), cuerpo-territorio foregrounds embodied knowledge and emotional geographies, making visible the ways in which spatial and social injustices are felt and remembered.

As a method, cuerpo-territorio has been primarily taken up by critical scholars across both the Global North(s) and South(s) working at the intersections of contemporary feminist debates on territory and critical geographies (Haesbaert, 2020; Martinez, 2025), embodiment (Berman Arevalo, 2023), healing (Macal, 2023), gender-based violence and migration (Dos Ventos Lopes Heimer, 2021), extractivism (Guzmán, 2024; Moreno & Montenegro, 2021), disaster and risk studies (Satizábal & Melo Zurita, 2021), pedagogy (Caretta & Pepa, 2023), and intersectional violence(s) (Glockner et al., 2024). It does not need to be explicitly research-activist in orientation; however, its ontological and epistemological foundations are rooted in commitments to research aimed at social transformation. Finally, as a method, cuerpo-territorio has been applauded for furthering decolonizing research (see e.g. Sippel and Ucero Jimenez, 2025), centering non-western feminist understandings of embodiment and offering a feminist method in knowledge construction. We share this piece as a contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the development of the method.

Applying the Method in Transnational Research

Through our research in Ecuador and South Africa on women’s resistance to mining, we examined the links between everyday gendered experiences of resource extraction, and collective organizing by women against it, in a transnational perspective. As feminist scholars, we recognised from past experience that walking interviews offer particular dimensions of their lived experience but were generally less adequate at exploring embodied and emotional elements. Cuerpo-territorio was identified as an important method to explore embodied experiences of women in extraction zones and to open up to other knowledges and ways of communicating often overlooked aspects of mineral extraction and the experience of against it.

The choice to focus on two case studies was therefore shaped by the ambition to start to develop a transnational understanding of women’s lived experiences as well as resistance to mining. One case study site was selected in each country, Xolobeni in South Africa and Oña and Nabon in Ecuador. Xolobeni is in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The population of the five villages of Xolobeni dates several generations, with most people being related, thus ensuring strong social cohesion. Nabón and Oña are in southern Ecuador, and their population identifies as mestizo.

Xolobeni, Oña and Nabón are similar in several aspects. They are traditional patriarchal communities. This is visible, for example, in the high prevalence gender- and domestic-based violence. Both places are rural and have experienced male migration for additional income generation through mining. Male migration has effectively put women in charge of both productive and reproductive work, in agriculture and in the home. The main livelihood of both locations is agriculture, with tourism and crafts having a secondary role in income generation. Agriculture is being jeopardized, by respectively, titanium and gold mines being proposed in the areas surrounding the villages. Both communities are resisting against these proposed mines: in Xolobeni, through the Amadiba Crisis Committee and in Oña/Nabon through Colectivo para la Defensa del Agua y la Vida del Cerro El Mozo (Collective for the Defense of Water and Life of the mountain El Mozo).

The research project was developed in a manner that allowed the same methods and data collection to be pursued at both sites in order to allow for comparative analysis to be conducted. The fieldwork periods were undertaken in a consecutive manner, with opportunities for reflection and adjustment to be made in the interim periods. The first stage of fieldwork included participant observation; and 24 interviews, some of them while walking methodologies (see Carpiano, 2009), with women from the community at each site. This first fieldwork was carried out in 2023 in Ecuador Caretta and Torres in Spanish, and 2024 in South Africa by Ramasar in isiMpondo with the help of an interpreter. Interviews and observation notes were software transcribed and hand-coded by the researcher(s) that had collected the data and then shared with the whole team to find recurring and common emerging themes. In the first round of fieldwork, the body came through as the “constant” variable given that mining is an important component of the economy in both Ecuador and South Africa, with social and ecological consequences. Following this preliminary analysis, the researchers returned to the field in 2024 and 2025, respectively, to carry out member checking workshops to share and validate the initial conclusions of the first round of fieldwork. Member-checking is a qualitative data validation method that allows to check with participants preliminary data analysis while adding nuances and details to the researchers’ understanding (Caretta, 2016). At the same time, the cuerpo-territorio workshops were carried out. In Oña and Nabón, three workshops with eight women each were undertaken, and in Xolobeni, two workshops with eight women each were carried out.

As for interviews, so for the workshops, women were recruited through snowball sampling via a local gatekeeper. Being a woman living in the community threatened by mining and having engaged in protesting and resisting mineral extraction were the two determinants of the sample. Some of the women we had interviewed were also part of the workshops, but it was not a requirement for them to be, as they were part of the same sample. The workshop provided researchers with visual and audio material – as the conversation was audio recorded. Such recording was software transcribed and helped us match the drawings with what women were sharing with us and among each other. Therefore, more than with a focus group that generally allows the collection of audio data of a group conversation (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2009), cuerpo territorio revolves around a visual representation made by participants themselves and specifically linking environmental change to their embodied experiences. Having recorded their exchanges was particularly valuable, as not everything they discussed transpired into the body maps. Moreover, wanting to be fully immersed in the workshop and being able to listen closely to what participants are saying, makes it hardly possible to take notes at the same time.

Altogether, the different data collection methods provided a detailed and nuanced understanding of the everyday lived experiences of women in the face of both changed livelihoods due to mining and experiences of engaging in resistance. The cuerpo-territorio mapping was a particularly useful method to uncover the often-overlooked aspects of embodied experience.

Practicing the Method

In this section, we critically reflect on the application of the method within the aforementioned project. The following observations are offered from the perspective of the research facilitators and investigators. Ideally, and in alignment with decolonial feminist approaches to knowledge production, this reflection would be undertaken collaboratively with research participants to explore why certain aspects of the method did not unfold as anticipated. While we hope to engage in that co-reflection in the future, for now we present our own insights into three issues encountered while practicing cuerpo-territorio: (a) time availability, (b) discomfort with drawing, and (c) complexities in linking the body and the territory. We offer our learned experiences as field investigators to fellow researchers preparing to practice the cuerpo-territorio method in the field as an effort toward decolonizing research and toward disrupting the power dynamics in the research process.

Time Availability

Cuerpo-territorio calls for a slow scholarship approach and greater flexibility throughout the research process. Likewise, it should account for the availability of time for both researchers and participants. We therefore strived to carry out the method in a constrained amount of time to respect the temporal realities and limited availability of overworked and burdened women. In both Oña and Nabón, Ecuador, and Xolobeni, South Africa, women are in charge of labor in the fields, while also being primary caretakers for their children. In other examples of cuerpo-territorio workshops (e.g. Colectiva Miradas Criticas, 2017b; Sippel & Ucelo Jiménez, 2025), the mapping exercise takes place with activists, academics and practitioners after an extensive introduction, time for grounding and reflection and sensory engagement. Thus, people have moments for meditation, for sharing and for building trust. The way cuerpo-territorio occurs therefore becomes more organic and people, who are part of an organization and do this as part of their work, are primed to engage in a method which may be out of their comfort zone. The reality in Xolombeni and Oña and Nabon was that structural poverty and constant social reproductive labor meant that the women were generally tired and, although we had capped the time of the workshop and informed participants repeatedly of it, they did not have as much time as the method would require for a deepened reflections on embodied emotions.

In Oña and Nabon, women are consumed by their daily productive and reproductive tasks. These communities are entrenched in patriarchal dynamics (see also Torres & Caretta, in press) that we could witness also in the form of husbands being outside in the street while the cuerpo-territorio workshop was being carried out, and insisting on their wives leaving the space to go milk the cows:

Participant 3: I am sorry I need to go because I need to go milk the cows and it is getting too late. This is all the time I have, I am already late and it will be getting dark soon.

(10 minutes into the exercise, Workshop 1, Ecuador, 2024)

Therefore, in Oña and Nabón, the workshops were held with communities affected by the mining company; although we had participation from leaders of the social organization, time was a limiting factor. In Xolobeni, women are heavily engaged with the Amadiba Crisis Committee and thus committed their time to the workshop as part of their political practice and to the cause. The researcher had been working with the Amadiba Crisis Committee on their resistance campaign in the week prior. However, the intimacy of cuerpo-territorio and the unfolding of emotional and embodied experiences was not centered sufficiently prior to the workshops. It was often quite difficult to bring up the emotional aspects of their resistance struggle, possibly because this was something that the women were not used to sharing. So, whilst the workshop was embedded within a longer interaction, the focus on embodied experience could have been developed in a slower and more relational manner. The shift from discussing political strategy to embodied experience was perhaps too abrupt. The lesson from applying the cuerpo-territorio method in South Africa was that we, as researchers, needed to create the space for a gentler introduction to thinking explicitly about body and territory as one, giving women space to slow down and be present with each other to find comfort and trust in expressing their experiences through this method. Whilst the connection between body and territory is articulated in Xolobeni, we found that the epistemological and cultural context and way of expressing this are different than in Abya Yala. Thus, the cuerpo-territorio methodology is both relational and context specific, while still providing a framework for comparing diverse places and geographies. The trade-off in the slow scholarship foregrounding cuerpo-territorio is that a compromise has to be made with the daily realities of the women and how much time they can dedicate to research participation. As researchers in the field, we need to understand the daily routines of the participants and build in flexibility that respects the time they can offer, while ensuring the integrity of the method.

Discomfort With Drawing

Visual methods are helpful in fostering the inclusion of participants with limited access to formal education (e.g Dutta, 2019). These methods can also bring other knowledges into the research process (Moralli, 2024). Drawing and mapping reality, for instance, are often positioned within social cartography as democratic exercises in knowledge construction (e.g. De Oliveira D’Antona et al., 2008). However, when participants are asked to draw their body(ies), discomfort frequently arises.

Because of the limited time available, we could not sufficiently explain, discuss and reiterate with participants the process of drawing. This circumstance meant that the purpose of the method was not picked up immediately by women. In Xolobeni there was a lot of laughter and joking about the method. Participants were surprised that a researcher was asking them to draw images of themselves. They associated this with children’s work or play. This impression was emphasized by the fact that the workshops took place in a classroom at the local school. This also led to a greater focus on the look and form of their drawings rather than the embodied experience they were seeking to convey. Conversations initially focused on what people looked like rather than what emotions were being shared. Likewise, in Oña women stated:

P1: “This is so ugly”

R: “ There is no right or wrong, it is just your emotions on your body” (Workshop 1, Ecuador, 2024)

Following the initial doubts and laughter, everyone started drawing themselves in a self-reflexive manner. In some cases, the women sat with a friend to make their figurines together or similar figurine, as they felt unsure about their drawing capabilities. In other instances, people started drawing and then asked for a second sheet to start again. Similarly, in Oña and Nabon, some participants rather felt that having to represent and portray something was more stressful than just speaking about it.

In this sense, the body-map acted more as a mediating artifact, facilitating discussion, rather than becoming the means through which women were representing how their emotions reverberated through their bodies. Therefore, the resulting drawings also contained quite a lot of text where participants thought they could convey more directly their feelings. Even if drawing is questioning rational ways of representation, it shows how participants have been taught to write instead of drawing, especially as adults. Disrupting these logics thus becomes another opportunity to use this as a method. At the same time, cuerpo-territorio can also benefit from nuanced understandings that both words and drawings are important for participants.

Linking the Body and the Territory

One of the advantages of the cuerpo-territorio method is its potential to demonstrate how territory is part of the body, and vice versa. However, this outcome cannot be assumed. Cuerpo-territorio has close epistemological and linguistic alignment in the Ecuadorian context compared to South Africa and Africa in general, where the framing may be different and the method has not had wide application to date. These issues highlight the need for careful facilitation and contextual sensitivity when applying the method, especially in transnational research (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Carrying out cuerpo-territorio in Ecuador (top image) and South Africa (bottom image)

Figure 2.

A figure drawn with nothing on the body itself but examples of extractive activities surrounding it (Workshop 2, South Africa, 2025)

This embodied and emotional overlap is portrayed, for instance, by encasing, on the body, by the heart a water spring or a mountain to show how their deterioration has affected women’s emotional state. To have participants reflect on their feelings about environmental change and destruction due to mining, we asked them questions that would generate feelings that they could put on paper. However, we found that women did not easily connect the environment with their own body (Figure 2). What happens when participants do not have an explicit awareness of the inseparability of bodies and territories, or the right means to express this? We encouraged participants to recognize how and where they were feeling certain emotions around the embodiment of territory. For example, after a long discussion:

R: you have now told us about the pain, the suffering you feel because of the destruction that the mining will bring. And the strength you feel when participate in marches and protests? How do we represent it on the figure?

P1. We can do tears and have a muscle arm.

(Workshop 2, Ecuador, 2024)

Although we had imagined that our engagement as researchers would merely entail providing participants with questions for reflection, we sometimes found ourselves guiding their drawing much closer because we wanted to make sure that all of women’s reflections would be mirrored in the mapping:

R: She has just said that the contaminated water smells bad.

P1: It is in the nose that we smell.

R: How can you represent it?

P2. We normally do this (putting a hand over their mouth and nose)

R: Yes, you do not want to smell it. How should we represent it? How do we represent the bad smell?

(Workshop 3, Ecuador, 2024)

Yet, participants were taking our elicitations as part of the conversation and did not necessarily transpose into paper what was being discussed. For instance, one participant in Xolobeni noted:

“On the day when the incident took place that we were beaten by the police, people were bitten by a snake and it traumatized me. Since this incident, I have never had a chance to express my emotions” (Workshop 1, South Africa 2025).

In Nabón, there was an instance where one participant cried, recalling the role her mother had in having her continue to fight against the mining company, yet she was unable to get that feeling into the drawing. In Xolobeni, most participants generically presented their feelings and emotions, often through a dot on the body or a straight line to reflect a place in their body where they felt hurt, as represented by this quote: “Also my neck has a mark to represent the stress I am going through” (Workshop 2, South Africa, 2025). The same applied to positive emotions in relation to their connection to the land. Notably, in the collective drawing, less embodied and affective aspects were portrayed, but there was a stronger focus on the physical territory and its threats. Women in Xolobeni did talk about the value of the land and ocean from a spiritual point of view, as it had previously emerged through interviews. They drew the ocean and then marked Shell as destroying it: “It feels good to protect the land. We survive through this land. We are planting from this land. In fact the land is our life” (Workshop 1, South Africa, 2025).

As for words, several objects were represented besides the body and not on the body. These objects served to bring to light events and anecdotes that women in both locations thought were important to get the full picture of the embodied feelings they were experiencing related to resistance to mining. For instance, in Nabón, women included a bill with an X on top to indicate a woman who, when bribed to stop protesting by the mining company, refused to do so. In Xolobeni, participants recounted a similar experience. On their way to the workshop, they stopped at a store for drinks, and men asked where they were going. When they mentioned that they were involved in a workshop related to the work of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, they were advised not to participate. This information was conveyed with pride by the women to one of the authors, as they stood up to the men and indicated that they would never stop fighting for their land. These experiences highlight that cuerpo-territorio can also demonstrate not only the embodiment of territory but also different scales of embodiment, meaning embodiment not only have to be in the body but also in what surrounds the individual and collective bodies.

Fourth, when portraying their emotions on the body, participants often centered around the same parts of the body: the head and heart to express sorrow, hurt, pain and stress (Figure 3).

R1: Is there anything positive that you can think of representing on the body? You speak of clean water and when you were young – how could you represent this on the body?

P4: we can do a flowering plant

R2: and where do we put it?

P3: On the heart.

P2: let us paint the heart in blue to indicate the water

(Workshop 2, Ecuador, 2024)

Figure 3.

Drawings of hearts from Xolobeni (two upper ones) and from Oña and Nabon (three lower down). In the first Ecuadorian heart it reads “positive” and “negative”, while the other two read “sadness. Because they destroy nature”

Additionally, sadness was mentioned and written on the heart in several instances, particularly when thinking about how the future of their children was compromised due to lack of clean water. Likewise, in Xolobeni, in some cases, the head and the heart were the only aspects that participants represented, and the rest of the body was untouched:

P2: I start with my head as I have a headache. This is because of the consistent thoughts about that land that is being taken from us. Where will we go? Our parents lie on this land (Workshop 2, South Africa, 2025).

Representing the body was a catalyst to share many of experiences related to violence and patriarchal oppression both within and outside the family. Communities do not value women’s contributions and just expect them to continue their consuming, everyday caring responsibilities, which, as women in Ecuador stressed plenty of times, generate an incredible amount of stress. This method allowed intimate personal details to be shared without easily tracing them back to individuals. Anonymity conveys safety for participants, while also being useful for researchers to effectively gather experiences without putting participants at risk.

Lessons Learnt

In this section, we conclude by providing some humble and hard-learned guidance, particularly to those who are eager to start engaging in cuerpo-territorio. The motivation behind this paper was the collective realization that, to sustain the epistemological and methodological rupture that cuerpo-territorio has created, we needed to also engage with the challenges when implementing the method. We acknowledge that these reflections would have been more valuable if done with participants and that some of the challenges described may result from our skills and abilities as facilitators or may be best understood as an exercise of hindsight.

First, time and timing are crucial. Cuerpo-territorio requires prior engagement with the community where this method should be carried out. Moreover, as our instances showed, time for preparation is fundamental. Although prior engagement in these case studies was carried out, the focus specifically on building a space for sharing embodied experiences was inadequate. Participants need to perceive the value of the method for themselves and the organized struggle they are part of to feel respected, heard, and safe to be able to contribute to it. We found, however, that such commitment is not always possible. Rural populations in Ecuador have been on the receiving end of lots of trainings related to their livelihood and have thus participated in lots of workshops without seeing any benefit, as they themselves report. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that participants were demotivated. Additionally, and not secondarily, Ecuador is undergoing a major political, security and economic crisis. People cannot fathom the lengthiness of academic research without seeing immediate advantages for themselves. On the contrary, in Xolobeni, women understood that researchers were allies in the fight of the Amadiba Crisis Committee and were thus eager to participate, as they saw the workshop as an opportunity to amplify their message. Notwithstanding their willingness to participate, women had to contend with the reality of logistics and everyday productive and reproductive responsibilities. Geographically, the villages are also distributed over a wide area, which meant that 3 hours for the workshop resulted in a five-to-six-hour commitment, including time to meet at a common site. Decolonizing methodologies build on the recognition that local epistemological entry points are more valuable for research participants, thus, potentially inverting the usual epistemic hierarchy (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021; Udah, 2024). Yet, for these methodologies to be meaningful, it is not sufficient that researchers realize their value and are ready to engage with them, local conditions, in terms of participation, understanding of the value of the research and time availability, need to be ensured. As much as researchers strive to reach an equal playing field by employing participatory action methodologies or decolonizing methodologies, they must come to terms with people’s everyday productive and reproductive pressured schedule. In many instances, we see local participants being overwhelmed by their everyday duties (see e.g. Torres & Caretta, in press) and thus it is unrealistic to ask them to make space and time for a lengthy workshop as cuerpo-territorio. It should also be recognized that local circumstances can change during year-long research projects. Such has been the case in Ecuador. Since we started the project in 2023, the country has plunged into an economic, security, and political crisis that has deteriorated people’s purchasing power and living conditions (Stoessel, 2024; Wolff & Dressler, 2024), to the point where commitments to resist and participate in protests again mineral extraction has subsided, particularly for those whose livelihood is dependent on the land.

Second, although getting women to draw was difficult at times and the final body-maps may not have fully reflected the discussions that had gone on during the workshop, working on paper to represent something was a catalyst that generated lots of thoughts for women. Drawing unlocked personal stories which reflected women’s embodied experiences. For instance, in Nabón, a participant recounted the violence she had faced during a protest when security staff from the mining company tried to beat her up. While that detail did not make it on paper, the exercise itself helped her reveal that important event where her work on territorial defense had substantial physical and emotional reverberations, but that did not make it to the picture. Likewise, in Xolobeni, although participants may not have been as comfortable or graphic in their illustrations, they did talk more about the violence than was previously shared through interviews. This is a powerful aspect of the method. Although land and visual representations do not always make it on the body-map, we should not discount the importance of the generated dialogue.

Third, the composition of the participants and whether they know each other is a paramount element, we found the workshop to be a fruitful space of exchange. In Oña and Nabon, while most women knew each other, some did not, and they are not part of a formalized activist group against the mine. Most of them are informed about the activities organized by provincial groups that resist mining, and some of them participate in meetings and marches all the time, while others do not. Therefore, the range of experiences and engagement was varied. In contrast, in Xolobeni, all the women were part of Amadiba Crisis Committee, and their sense of belonging and pride in the movement was strong. They were very vocal talking about what is happening in their territory and how they are fighting it. The cuerpo-territorio method was particularly powerful in that it centered on aspects of their struggle which are not often discussed, creating an opening for epistemological resistance.

Finally, the geographical origin of this method might imply that defense of life and territory is at the core of every community resisting outside interference, or that the ontology underlying this method is more familiar with Latin American participants. Our case questions that. In Oña and Nabon, the women we worked with were as unaware of the method as in Xolobeni and encountered similar difficulties during the workshop, e.g. drawing, emplacing the territory in the body. The very concept of cuerpo-territorio was new, had to be explained and did not necessarily resonate with the women, although they often talked about the connection to the land and the water. Whilst connections to land and water were made by all the women and defense of life and territory was at the core of their resistance, this does not automatically translate into knowledge of, and ease of use with, cuerpo-territorio as a method. We argue that it is important to distinguish between the language and knowledges used by resistance movements and the methodological tools of generating knowledge. As a method coming from movements and politically engaged scholars, cuerpo-territorio has potential to support epistemological resistance, but we cannot assume that this is self-evident to all.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned issues, we still found cuerpo-territorio to be a valuable method to gather both visual and oral, culturally nuanced findings, which encapsulated both individual and collective stories in a transnational context that shares the threat of mining. Engaging with cuerpo-territorio allowed us to connect everyday experiences of extractivism with embodied experiences. Having used the same method across geographies also gave us a framework to analyze the data and see if there were any patterns, similarities, or differences among the two locations. Besides bringing forth embodied lived experiences, reflecting on the territory and participants’ emotional connections with it also brought forth important accounts of past and ongoing changes in women’s surroundings that impact their everyday lives. The construction of road infrastructure in Xolobeni, and the depletion of the paramo to make pasture for dairy cows in Oña, would not have necessarily surfaced through the interviews, which focused mostly on the motives behind women’s resistance against mining. Thinking about the territory and the body through the workshop provided us as researchers with important data to more fully understand recent past and present environmental change, which, in conjunction with the threat of mining, affects women’s livelihoods and sense of belonging to their territory.

Ultimately, our experience highlights the need for decolonizing scholarship with participants are able to contribute meaningfully to research on resistance to mining and to being politically useful for movements. Yet, what we have learnt in hindsight is that we cannot assume that participants who in some cases a activists will be able to lend their time to research endeavors, although they realize its value. In ideal circumstances, having time to properly deploy the method, leaving space for plenty of participants’ reflections, avoids instrumentalizing the method as purely a data gathering tool and opens the possibility of rupturing it and making it their own for participants and researchers, alike. Hence, we argue that realizing when these circumstances are not present and adjusting the course of our projects is a fundamental part of our work of reflexivity as scholars. Practicing cuerpo-territorio was an exercise in exploration and humility. In this paper, we have shared the lessons we learnt as a way of moving the research method frontier forward and ultimately contribute to improving and decolonizing research.