Introduction

The Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador (or el Colectivo) is exemplary of contemporary feminist collective geography praxis happening in Latin America. The geographical reach of our activism is mainly within Latin America, with a lot of our work focusing on the Amazon region. We accompany social movements and collectives in the defense of their territories against extractive industry, militarization, migrant criminalization, and patriarchal formations of space. Currently our work focuses on denouncing the negative consequences of extractive industry, gender-based violence and most recently the relationship between structural racism, the reinforcement of racist border regimes and COVID-19 from critical cartography and geography perspectives. We focus on implementing critical geography methods and developing geospatial analysis based on the needs of the communities with whom we work. Since 2012, the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador has organized around geographical critiques of extractivist industry, patriarchy, and the connection between the two. As of 2020, we have also delved into the geographies of human mobility, which will also be addressed in this chapter.

Many of the collective's members are research activists, and are members of both academic institutions and activist groups. We are about 25 members in total. About half our members hold a PhD or are studying in a PhD program. Many have participated in social movements since youth, in particular feminist and ecology movements. And almost all belong to another activist collective aside from el Colectivo. Our members are also spread out across the world in Spain, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Colombia, Mexico, and the Netherlands and members residing in Ecuador are from the USA, Italy, and non-urban centres within Ecuador. At some point each member has lived in Ecuador but now find themselves in other parts of the globe. And while we are called the Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador, our reach is transnational given how our own bodies have moved through multiple scales and with that bring different geographical epistemologies, ontologies, methodologies, methods, and activist praxis into conversation. As will be further explored in this chapter, we understand the embodiment of human mobility by most of the collective's members to be part of the translocation of feminist geographical praxis and feminist geography activist practices (Zaragocin, 2021; Falanga, 2022).