Over the last few years, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and an escalating climate crisis, narratives about “the end of the world” have become increasingly common. Concepts like “ecological disaster” and “human extinction,” originally cautionary, have shifted towards either outright denial or deterministic nihilism. In Latin America, recent political and ecological crises—water scarcity in Mexico, mass deforestation in the Amazon, the continued assassination of indigenous environmental activists, and the epidemic of gender-based violence across the region, to name a few—reflect this trend.

Despite this bleak outlook, the recent reinvigoration of a women’s global movement has created a new pathway for reflection and intervention. In Latin America, the NiUnaMenos [NotOneWomanLess] grassroots collective has demonstrated the importance of convivial politics to expose the mechanisms of patriarchal violence on women, indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as the intimate ties between the precarization of their lives, aggravated by ecological destabilization. Their debates combine diverse forms of political imagination, critical fabulation, and situated knowledge to problematize an omnipresent apocalyptic sentiment that takes over all aspects of contemporary life. They impact how cultural, intellectual, and artistic production gives way to interdisciplinary contributions that haven’t yet been sufficiently explored.

Our workshops propose to reflect on these complex circumstances by addressing some crucial questions: 

1) Which role do female-driven critical, theoretical, and artistic narratives have in unsettling current apocalyptic perspectives in Latin America? 

2) In what ways do these cultural productions intervene in the current “end of the world” landscape? 

3) Which conceptual and critical cross-disciplinary strategies connected to political imagination can be drawn from these creations? 

4) How do they promote a sense of productive awareness that resists generalized pessimism and nihilism?