Salazar, Diana Paola Salazar Morales; (2025) Co-Producing an Environmental History of La Guajira: Building Solidarity through Decolonising Narratives. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis contributes to the field of environmental history by drawing on Ramachandra Guha’s (1998) decolonial study of environmental transformation through his research into social struggles in colonial India. Focusing on the case of Wayuu and African-descent people in La Guajira, Colombia, resisting coal extraction from the Cerrejon mine, this thesis develops a decolonial methodology that explores practices of co-production and the use of daily life testimonies (Molano, 2001). It does so to weave a complex connection between global, political and economic issues with understandings of the lived experience of territorial transformation. The thesis has three aims. First, to produce a decolonial environmental history of La Guajira. Second, to develop a practice of solidarity by co-producing research with communities in La Guajira, involving the creation of artefacts for popular education (Fals Borda and Rahman, 1991), which can be used in campaigns to support the communities’ struggle and communicate their voices to a broader audience. Finally, it proposes a practice for environmental history that combines various kinds of writing which carry arguments in different ways – critical and creative, sole and co-authored, word and image, visual and sonic, including theory and co-produced artefacts – and which, taken together, create a ‘new’ method for making a decolonial environmental history that practises solidarity. The thesis is divided into five parts, beginning with the introduction and ending with the conclusion; the second part introduces the conceptual framework and methodology, while the third and fourth parts, drawn directly from my fieldwork, are in dialogue with each other. These third and fourth parts each adopt a specific structure to convey their arguments. Each is composed of three sections: first, a scene with voices taken directly from the fieldwork; second, a presentation of, and commentary on, the research conducted in the field, connected to arguments in related literature; and finally, a co-produced artefact for popular education.

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