Kleijburg, Fleur (2025) Defending Life in the Ecuadorian Amazon: At the Frontlines of the Living Forest. Bachelor thesis, Global Responsibility & Leadership (GRL).
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Abstract
This thesis explored how the Living Forest, defended by the Indigenous Women of the Ecuadorian Amazon, exposes and resists the intersectional violences of extractivist activities enacted on nature, knowledge, and gender, contributing to increasing scholarly work on Indigenous and gendered perspectives. The extraction of natural resources in Ecuador has imposed environmental, epistemic, and gender-based harm, especially on Indigenous People and Women. Strengthened in Their resilience and agency, these impacts have fuelled powerful resistance movements, particularly those led by Indigenous Women’s organisations such as the Amazonian Women. A thematic case study analysis has been conducted through the theoretical lenses of intersecting violence rooted in colonial-capitalist-patriarchal logics, decolonial ecofeminism, and the Living Forest framework as exposure and resistance. This framework reveals and counteracts the intersecting violence of extractivism as an ontology of inseparability, territory and body-territory, and a knowledge and communication system. Rooted in relationality and interdependence between humans and nature and through embodied resistance practices of forest-, territory-, and knowledge-making, the Amazonian Women and Peoples expose interconnected violences deeply embedded in extractivism. Above all, They fight for the preservation of Their ancestral epistemologies and cosmovisions, cultural identity, territorial integrity, and bodily sovereignty, all coexisting in the living, conscious, right-bearing entity of the Living Forest. By centering the experiences and ontologies of the Indigenous Peoples and Women of the Ecuadorian Amazon, this thesis highlights the importance of reimagining post-extractive futures and advocating for climate and epistemic justice.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Cervantes Benavides, C. |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Jun 2025 14:02 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2025 14:02 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/676 |
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