Dr. Aline Carrara (she/hers)
I am a mother and identify myself as a cis woman. I practice permaculture and grow food, medicinal plants and flowers. I am a massage therapist, an artist, a storyteller, and an activist for anti-colonial and decolonial practices. Both my personal and professional trajectories have been marked by the severe consequences of power asymmetries of local and global politics in people’s lives. My upbringing resulted in a lifelong commitment to socio-environmental justice.
I am a broadly trained social scientist and identify primarily as a nature-society geographer and human geographer. I believe land is the most fundamental entity that sustain all forms of life and earth’s systems, thus one of the most important elements for a thriving healthy bio-socio-diversity. I am an advocate for ideas around pluriversalism and alternatives to development as ways to move beyond the reductionism of modernity and the oppression of ‘capitalocentrism’.
For the past 20 years I have been actively engaged in the intersections of human rights, justice, development, environmental change and land management issues in Latin America, working around strategies to tackle deforestation. I have broad experience in the Pan-Amazonian region, more specifically the Brazilian Amazon, where I have lived and worked with grassroots movements and indigenous peoples.
I see social permaculture as a potential framework for addressing important counter-
hegemonic tools and for promoting radically alternative visions of the future through a heart-
based political ecology of human relationships, communities, social systems and networks. I am
passionate about the ethos of the creative life force.
