Landscapes of Loss: Mapping the Affective Experience of Deforestation Among Diverse Social Groups in the South American Chaco

2026-07-22

Environmental upheavals generate losses across diverse sectors of society, and can heighten risks of social conflict (UNCCD 2017). Mapping the histories, memories and affective experiences of such losses among impacted communities could help expose incipient social tensions before they escalate. In the South American Gran Chaco, the rate of deforestation – which is among the highest in the world – is impacting the landscapes and livelihoods of indigenous, peasant, and white settler groups in both shared and competing ways. By working together with satellite data researchers, this multi-disciplinary project proposes an innovative collaborative approach to mapping the lived social and affective experience of rapid deforestation in the Gran Chaco through participatory memory-mapping: a process where local communities with antagonistic histories are invited to interact with the satellite data themselves, generating their own narratives of the various landscapes they have lost through a technique I call “affective mapping.” This collaborative approach enables both multi-disciplinary researchers as well as locals to develop new comparative understandings of how deforestation impacts communities in both shared and unequal ways, thus providing contexts for better understanding incipient tensions over resources.

Italy

2026-02-01