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Diego Melo (CU Geography), Bernardino Mosquera (Río Quito, Chocó) and Juan Diego Espinosa (National University of Colombia) have been awarded one of ten Antipode Foundation “Right to the Discipline” Grants. They will develop a community-based film with Black and White-Mestizo peasant-farmer communities living along the upper Atrato River basin in northwestern Colombia. The project is titled “Living in the wake of a mining disaster: Co-creating film narratives along the Atrato River, from the gold they mined to the skin we inhabit.” 

Antipode Foundation “” grants are intended to facilitate creative intellectual and political interventions, inventive forms of collaboration, and tears in the fabric of extant orthodoxies in geography. There are many radical practices, ideas, and sites of knowledge production that do not receive support in the current funding environment. These grants encourage imaginative, daring, and unruly scholarship and praxis, including but not limited to workshops, scholar-activism, and conventional modes of research. The Antipode Foundation recognises movements and forces of social and spatial change already at work inside/outside the academy, and wish to amplify interventions that might otherwise not receive funding. In so doing, the Antipode Foundation wants to support attempts to go beyond, and reshape, the boundaries of established academic practice.

Diego and colleagues will facilitate a series of workshops to explore the non-conventional, contradictory, deeply affective, and embodied narratives of people who have been exposed to mining-induced riverine pollution. The 10,000 GBP grant will be used for travel expenses, walk-along interviews, body-territory workshops, a poetry circle, and a script-writing and video editing workshop. These activities will facilitate the tools for participants to build their own narrative and co-produce a film about the slow violence of mechanized gold and copper mining on communities’ bodies and territories.