TERRITORY AND DECOLONIAL DEBATES IN ARGENTINEAN GEOGRAPHY: AN EMERGENT DIALOGUE

Abstract

Debates about decoloniality call into question social sciences’ epistemic colonization, which is manifested in the Eurocentrism that guides their intellectual production. Such Eurocentrism, to which geography does not escape, is expressed "in the way we build our concepts, the way we interpret, and the way we make comparisons of historical and social phenomena, in short, [it is expressed] in the way we produce knowledge, and make sense of the world” (CRUZ, 2017: 18). This article builds onto a previous collaboration that analyzed the uses of the concept territory in articles published between 2005 and 2021 in academic journals of Geography based in national universities in Argentina. We seek to contribute to the emergent body of research that brings decolonial approaches and geography together. For this, we analyze a selection of articles published in geography magazines that problematize the concept of territory, and we investigate to what extent, and in what sense, this geographical scientific production dialogues with debates raised around coloniality / decoloniality. The analysis shows that decolonial discussions are present explicitly only in a few cases. Overall, they tend to remain on a more theoretical level rather than being grounded with an empirical analysis. However, there are some articles that present decolonial traces in the problematizations, perspectives and scales involved, even when they do not establish an explicit link with these discussions.