This year’s UCSIA Summer School student Ely Orrego Torres and Diego Rossello published a paper in Social Compass on Imagining ecopolis: Visions of ecofeminist political theology and ecocriticism in Latin America.
Although often overlooked by mainstream accounts of political theology and ecocriticism in the Global North, powerful visions of an ecopolis have been emerging in Latin America. In this article, we review the status of mainstream approaches to notions such as subject, citizen, and personal dignity and put them in a critical dialogue with Latin American Ecofeminist Political Theologies (LAEPT). We argue that those notions, often conceived from a Western and anthropocentric perspective, show their limits when interrogated from the perspective of LAEPT. Accordingly, we suggest that their main contribution lies not only in their critique of the Western paradigm but also in advancing alternative conceptions of an ecologically conscious political community that considers the Earth as sacred, and nature as a reflection of the divine. We conclude that such conceptions can also be seen at work in the rights of nature enshrined in the so-called new Latin American Constitutionalism.
Ely Orrego Torres is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. Currently, she is a Visiting PhD student at Sciences Po, affiliated with the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI). Her dissertation studies the politics of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas over the last years (2017–2023) by devoting attention to transnational and regional networks, particularly, the civil society actors participating in the Organization of American States (OAS).