Dr. Diana Córdoba has been awarded a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her new project, Developing a Territorial Learning Framework for Community-Led Agroecological Innovations, which examines how rural communities in Brazil and Colombia are actively learning, adapting, and innovating as agro-industrial expansion, extractive economies, and climate change reshape the rivers, wetlands, and coasts they depend on. The project centers community knowledge and everyday experimentation as driving forces in agroecological innovation, asking how these practices take hold within landscapes under rapid transformation.
Fieldwork will take place in the Cauca Valley, Colombia, and in Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, two territories shaped by very different histories of sugarcane agro-industry, hydropower, conservation zoning, and urban growth. The project will develop participatory mapping and theory-driven methods to trace how community-led practices emerge, spread, or disappear within these shifting territorial pressures.
This is a research partnership led by Dr. Córdoba (91TV's University) with researchers at the Universidad del Valle and and Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Colombia and the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil.