Spring 2025 Courses
- LALX 390 ‒ Reclaiming the Future: Contemporary Technology, Culture & Society in Latin America
- SPAN 403 ‒ Literature and the Environment in Latin America
Azucena Castro is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of Latin American literary and cultural studies and socio-political ecologies. Before joining Rice, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Faculty of Science, Stockholm University. She held Postdoctoral positions in Latin American and Caribbean cultures at Stanford University and in human geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Her scholarly work focuses on 20th and 21st century Latin American cultural products through the lens of climate and energy justice, multispecies resistance, and anti-extractivist critique in the artivist scenes of South America, particularly, Southern Cone and Brazil. Azucena is the author of the forthcoming book Poetic Postnatures. Ecological Thinking and Politics of Strangeness in Contemporary Latin American Poetry, Series SubAtlantic at De Gruyter (2025, in Spanish). This is the first in-depth study on Latin American environmental poetry in transnational perspective since the emergence of the Environmental Humanities field. Currently, she is finishing a book manuscript on decolonizing invasion ecologies in South American art and literature in the context of chemical colonialism (pesticides). This project has been supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council. She is also developing a book project on drought at the intersection of climate change studies and anti-colonial/extractivist critique.
Books and Edited Volumes
Posnaturalezas poéticas: Pensamiento ecológico y políticas de la extrañeza en la poesía latinoamericana contemporánea, Serie SubAtlantic, De Gruyter (2025, in press).
Ed., Futuros multiespecie. Prácticas vinculantes para un planeta en emergencia. Valencia: Bartlebooth, 2023.
Ed., Contesting the Unthinkable from the Margins: Cultural Responses to Climate Change and Environmental Catastrophes in Latin America and the Caribbean (with Gianfranco Selgas and Ken Benson), University Press of Florida, in production forthcoming Spring 2026.
Ecopoetics and Contemporary Ecological Politics from the Postnatural South (with Santiago Acosta and Nuno Marques) (under contract with Brill Academic Publishers), manuscript in progress, publication planned for 2026.
Special Issues in Journals
Ed., “The Geological Turn in Latin America: Inhuman Mediations from the Critical Zone” (with Estefanía Bournot). Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (forthcoming, Spring 2025).
Ed., “GeoSemantics. Inhuman Becomings and Earthly Memories in the Global South” (with Estefanía Bournot). ASAP/J, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023.
Ed., “Environmental Humanities in Latin America: From Transdisciplinary to Undisciplined Practices” (with Sofía Rosa and Mauricio Cheguhem). Humanities. Journal of the University of Montevideo, 13.
Ed., “Presents and Futures of Technological Sovereignties” (with Juan Reina-Rozo, Ana Laura Cantera, Juan Pablo Soler Villamizar and Lucas Carruba). International Journal of Engineering, Social Justice and Peace, Queen’s University, 2023, 10:1.
Ed., “Law, Literature and Art from Latin America” (with Mauricio Pulecio and Áurea María Sotomayor-Miletti). Cuadernos de Literatura. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2022, 26.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters (selection)
“Toxic Transits: Double-Gaze, Slow Violence and North-South Ecologies of Inequalities in the Environmental Films Sealed Cargo (Bolivia) and Arica (Chile and Sweden).” Contesting the Unthinkable from the Margins: Cultural Responses to Climate Change and Environmental Catastrophes in Latin America, eds. Azucena Castro, Gianfranco Selgas and Ken Benson. University Press of Florida (forthcoming 2025, forthcoming spring 2026).
“Puñado de tierra fresca. Regional Cosmopolitics, Material Geopoetics and Reactionary Sadness in the Poets Jorge Teillier and Rolando Cárdenas from Southern Chile (1950-1960).” Cosmopolitismos disidentes. Redes, viajes, articulaciones, eds. Jorge Locane and Mario Cámara, Córdoba, Argentina: EDUVIM. Villa María University Press (in press, 2025).
“Reclaiming Energy Flows: Energy GeoHumanities and the Socio-Ecologies of Rivers in Latin American Hydro-Modernities” (with Verónica Hollman). Geohumanities, 2024, 1–20.
“Energy sovereignty storytelling: Art Practices, Community-led Transitions, and Territorial Futures in Latin America” (with Alejandro Ponce de León, Verónica Olofsson, Ana Laura Cantera, and Juan Reina-Rozo). Tapuya. Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2024, 7.
“Unjust Winds of Change: The Politics and Narratives of Wind Farms in the Brazilian Northeast” (with Veronica Olofsson). Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 2024, 53(1): 63–75.
“Equity and Justice Should Underpin the Discourse on Tipping Points” (with Laura Pereira, Ignacio Gianelli, Therezah Achieng, Sally Archibald, Suchinta Arif, et al.). Special issue: Tipping Points in the Anthropocene, Earth System Dynamics, 2024, 15:2.
“Inviting a Decolonial Praxis for Future Imaginaries of Nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree” (with Naomi Terry, Bwalya Chibwe, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Codruta Savu, and Laura Pereira). Environmental Science & Policy, 2024, 151.
“Technologies to Embrace the Sun: Solarpunk-Based Project as an Exploration for a Just Energy Transition” (with Juan Reina-Rozo, Francisco Zamb.rano Caviedes, Agustín Neko Epieyu). Iberoamerican Journal of Development Studies, University of Zaragoza, 2024, Vol. 13, no 1, p. 162-187.
“Geopoéticas líticas. Notas para una geografía inhumana desde prácticas artísticas con piedras en Argentina y Perú.” Punto Sur. Journal of Geography, University of Buenos Aires, 8, 2023, pp. 114-138.
“Narratives and Geographic Imaginaries around Hydroelectric Dams in Patagonia: Energy Entanglements to Think the Anthropocene on a Regional Scale (1967-2021)” (with Hortensia Castro).
Special number: “The Anthropocene from the Perspective of Historical Analysis,” eds. Victoria Samarago and José Pádua, Topoi. History Journal, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2023, 54.
“Sites of Situated Hope: Amazonian Rhythms, Unruly Caribbean Plants and Post-Anthropocentric Gazes in Contemporary Latin American Cinema” (with Gianfranco Selgas). Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 31:4, 2023, pp. 591-612.
“Vernacular Sustainabilities −Multispecies Stories and Life-Death Entanglements of the Sertão Nordestino in Contemporary Brazilian Futurisms (the film Bacurau and the sertãopunk comic Cangaço Overdrive).” Humanities, 2022, 11, 2:50.
“Aesthetic Challenges of Post-Development. Non-Extractive Imaginaries and Post-Fossil Futures in Andean Cultural Media” (with Luis Prádanos). Post-Global Aesthetics: 21st Century Latin American Literatures and Cultures, eds. Gesine Müller and Benjamin Loy. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 149-168.
“Cosmopolitical Spaces −Operations of the Anaphora as Mutual Worlding in the Poems Las linternas flotantes by Mercedes Roffé and Después de la oscuridad by Marta López Luaces.” Territorios in(di)visibles. Dilemas en las literaturas hispánicas actuales, eds. Ken Benson and Juan Carlos Cruz Suárez. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021, pp. 243-271.
“At the Biocultural Borderland: The Unfolding of Multispecies Encounters in Latin American Bioart.” Special number: “Environmental Humanities: Ecocriticism and Cultural Decolonization,” ed. Luis I. Prádanos. 452ºF. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, 2019, 21.
“Shrieks from the Margins of the Human: Framing the Environmental Crisis in Two Contemporary Latin American Movies” (with Leticia Gómez). Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 10:1, 2019, pp. 177-195.
Report
Pereira, Laura; Achieng, Therezah; Castro, Azucena at al. “4.6 Risks, Equity and Justice in the Governance of Positive Tipping Points,” THE GLOBAL TIPPING POINTS REPORT, University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, launched December 6 at COP28, 2023.
Encyclopedia Article
“Latin American Multispecies Studies” (with Oscar Tellini), Oxford Bibliographies Online in Latin American Studies, Oxford University Press, 2024.
Book-Length Translation of Ecopoetry
Antropoceno. Poema para una nueva época. Spanish Translation of book-length poem Antropocen. Dikt för en ny epok by Swedish poet Jonas Gren. Cactus del Viento, 2024.