Assembling the warp: introduction

We are a collective of eight women geographers that strives to create community among women geographers from diverse latitudes. We began this project in September 2014, rooting ourselves in the march on Mexico City after the forced disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa. GeoBrujas, Community of Women Geographers, arises as a political necessity against the violent context of the state, the extreme violence against women in Mexico, and the lack of spaces for women geographers within and outside of academia. We align with the creation of other geographies through political and social relationships.

Our impulse and continuous work are the development of a community stemming from self-generated, radical, and alternative geographies that do not adhere to the rhythms of hegemonic systems or the hierarchical relations within any field or level. Our aim is to integrate the rhythms of each compañera (comrade) to collectively amplify our perspectives.

As a collective, GeoBrujas positions ourselves alongside other collaborative networks which centre projects, organizations, movements, and people looking towards autonomy as a common horizon, those that include selfcritique between that which is personal as well as political. We perform this collective labour to construct ‘geografias otras’ among all of us and for all of us with our activism and our academic, political, and personal work in our day-to-day activities.

Among us, we use diverse methodological perspectives and foci to create critical cartographies, counter-cartographies, and mapping from a multileveled analysis. We use tools based in the arts, therapeutic techniques, popular education, social cartography, participatory systems of geographic information, and other foci. We share common concerns, interests, and learning processes through workshops and talks. Through this, we continue working towards learning about self-care, the strengthening of and the emotional health of our territorio-cuerpo-tierra (territory-body-earth) in different contexts of dispossession.

The body, as the first level of our work, has regained recent importance in militant activism and academic investigation. In this sense, our work emphasizes mapping the body as territory and as feminist cartography, though this mapping is not over-generalized across communities. The foci and the experiences of each integrant are distinct, thus enriching and challenging us to amplify each individual standpoint impacting the multiple geographies and perspectives that cross our bodies.