Ecomedia Literacy’s El Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay: The Practice of Care in Media Education in Latin America

ABSTRACT

The Andean concept of “sumak kawsay” (translated as el buen vivir in Spanish and the good life/good living in English) entails a form of relationality between humans and the other-than-human realms (land, water, minerals, air, spirits, etc.) based on care and reciprocity. Corresponding with the “eco-territorial turn” in Latin American social movements, el buen vivir/sumak kawsay informs an ecocentric and decolonial disposition that recognizes the need to confront the disproportionate ecological impacts of information and communication technology (ICTs) and global communications on marginalized populations. In this article, the authors explore how ecomedia literacy expands the notion of care to the other-than-human world in media education, and through the work of artists/activists in Ecuador who are using poetry and music in their unique expression of ecomedia literacy and eco-territorial media practices.

KEYWORDS:

• El Buen Vivir
• media education
• ecomedia literacy
• Latin America
• eco-territorial media

Anyone who spends time with media literacy educators knows that the movement has a strong impulse of care. Aside from the underlying value of care that drives people into the field of education in the first place – care for knowledge, student well-being, health of democracy and society, etc. – media literacy educators strongly care about vital aspects of civic life. Lessons abound about media and sexism, racism, ableism, inequality, disinformation, and so on that reflect an underlying concern for the betterment of life, culture, society, and beyond. Yet, in the development of media literacy over the past 40 years, very little attention has been made to direct this same sense of care to the other-than-human world. This is despite findings from ethnographic research of media literacy experts who in their personal lives “care” about the environment and climate disruption, but they lack the background, motivation, support, and training to bring this into their own media literacy practice (López, 2014). This is not surprising given that most educators work in anthropocentric educational and institutional settings dominated by Western epistemology that eschews an eco-ethic of care.

In response, ecomedia literacy draws attention to the various ways media impact the environment by drawing on an expanded definition of media promoted by ecomedia studies (Lopez and Ivakhiv 2024). Its learning activities explore how media are of and about the environment, which means confronting head-on the ways our media actively rely on an extractive political economy that exploits ecosystems and people. When we engage, enjoy, or critique media, we should also recognize how infrastructure and production chains depend on disposable populations and ecological sacrifice zones. Along with ecojustice advocates, ecomedia literacy connects environmental struggles with social justice, and hence expands the notion of care beyond what is traditionally addressed by media education. One likeminded effort is Oziewicz’s (2023) climate and literature education framework, Climate Literacy Capabilities and Knowledges (CLICK), which explicitly identifies the importance of “Earth Care,” “Kinship Care,” “People Care,” and “Systems Care.”

Ecomedia literacy is practiced in different ways. It can encompass more traditional media literacy activities like deconstructing media texts, but from an ecocritical perspective. Learners are directed to identify a range of environmental ideologies and eco-ethical positions in media, such as Super Bowl advertisements for electric vehicles (EVs). But unlike common media literacy techniques, ecomedia analysis moves beyond the text to also explore how systems of production are embedded in ecologically destructive practices, such as questioning how a transition to EVs will affect communities impacted by the extraction of minerals like lithium or cobalt for car batteries. Moreover, root causes of environmental destruction and exploitation are investigated, such as exploring how worldviews and environmental ideologies are expressed through media and inform their political ecology. Ecomedia literacy directly addresses the margins of the global economy taken for granted by those in the higher-income regions of the world. It is increasingly inspired by diverse forms of eco-activism emerging from Latin America, finding resonance with el buen vivir and eco-territorial media practices.

If neoliberalism is “uncaring by design,” then el buen vivir is “care by design,” as it expands from an anthropocentric moral framework to one that encompasses the other-than-human world. As defined by Gómez-Barris (2017, p. 23), “el buen vivir, refers to the organization of social and ecological life based on Afro-Indigenous principles and the transmission of vernacular practices that maintain a deep and respectful relationship to land, place, and the natural world.” Likewise, it “emphasizes a notion of community that moves beyond the traditional Western conception of a social, relatively homogeneous structure and instead understands it as a continuum of society and nature living in unity (common-unity)” (Arcila Calderón et al., 2018, p. 190).

El buen vivir is derived from sumak kawsay, a concept from the Andean Indigenous language of Kichwa. As the first country to incorporate the Rights of Nature in their constitution, Ecuadorians chose the words sumak kawsay to express the Andean relational worldview that challenges capitalistic notions of development and promotes recognition of intrinsic values of the natural world (Morales, 2022). Shortly after Ecuador included sumak kawsay in their constitution, Bolivia followed suit and passed its Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (Ley de derechos de la Madre Tierra). Since 2006, over 409 rights of nature initiatives have been filed in 39 countries (Putzer et al., 2022). This is a growing international movement to impart personhood rights to nature, rejecting the logic of domination in favor of a perspective that values ecosystems such as the Whanganui River in New Zealand and manoomin wild rice in Minnesota (Surma, 2021).

Poetry as eco-territorial media practice

El buen vivir is grounded in a sense of territory that involves “historic memory, culture, language, and protection of local ecologies and modes of living” (Coryat, 2023, p. 250). This forms the foundation for emerging eco-territorial media practices in Latin America that include (but not limited to) community radio, poetry, music, documentary filmmaking, indigenous storytelling, performance, and video art (Coryat, 2023). They have common values that reject exploitative capitalism, development-driven polices, and emphasize the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. In their struggle for Indigenous rights and environmental justice in Ecuador, Sarawi Andrango and Darío Itza Pilaquinga share in this section their prose about the importance of the worldview encapsulated in the concept sumak kawsay as expressed through poetry, art, education, and activism.

They come with me

Perhaps they’re undocumented,

the thousands of notes and cries of persecuted birds,

because they seem like tenants,

in this world of owners.

Today an entire mountain is disappeared,

tomorrow a forest in one mouthful,

next year

the rivers in a gulp.

And our people,

those of us who are one with this land,

remain the sacrificial ones.

Community poetry is born from resistance, it always walks with the memory of grandfathers and grandmothers, it walks in the mountains and among the trees of the jungle. The poetry of ornaments and shapes, rhyme and perfect meter, is not always among us, it does not accompany the narrow streets, the cobblestones, it does not walk the dirt roads. It is not always born from the bare hands that sowed the seed more than five thousand years ago. Seed that accompanied tears and joys. Sowing that is hope, effort of the ayllu, of families from all corners so that one day the fruits of collective work will be the end of hunger.

Indigenous and peasant communities are ancient guardians of seeds, of food biodiversity, and this relationship is possible only when expanding kinship relationships between human beings and non-human beings, as well as between people and the territory; between families and the Apu guardian of a mountain, lagoons, rivers or valleys. Finally, in the Andean case, the communities are children of the mountains and from the very heart of the territories they are named as tayta or mama, like this: Tayta Ilaló, Mama Tungurahua, Tayta Rumiñahui, Mama Cotacachi. It is these presences that marked the identity with the territory since ancient times. It is this relationship of cohabitation in the territories that will determine decision-making about community life.

In the global context, there are no isolated territories, they are all under the magnifying glass of research, prospects for mining and oil growth. This is not limited to mineral extractive activity, but is linked to the dispossession and accumulation of land, and at the same time, the expansion of monocultures and the use of transgenic seeds. If this were not enough, the States themselves, starting from the green revolution, became the ideal partners for the promotion of the use of industrial pesticides, which come from the same companies linked to the global agri-food system.

There are just four companies: Bayer, Sygenta Group, Coterva Agriscience, and Basf that control two-thirds of the market for seeds and industrial pesticides (FIAN International & Zago Brothers, 2021, September 21). However, the corporate capture of food systems does not only translate to the sale and control of commercial distributors, but also to the dependence of the various agricultural sectors on these corporations. We have reached the absurdity of agricultural production in rural areas. Today for example, in order for indigenous and farming communities to produce and trade potatoes (which are a tuber native to the “American” continent) they must be grown with agrochemicals from other regions. In the case of quinoa and amaranth (also originating in the Andean territory of Abya Yala, South America), despite their high nutritional and preventive value, they are grown almost exclusively for export thanks to the fact that they have been replaced by pre-cooked foods with a high content of preservatives that are not very beneficial to health. The food sovereignty of our people has been gradually replaced by food security that is linked to the world market and not necessarily to meeting the demand for quality food.

With the presence of monocultures, the dynamics of the agricultural cycle connected to the states and seasons of nature are broken in such a way that the rites and rituals of the communities and territories disappear. The celebrations: songs, prayers, dances of sowing, germination, flowering, and harvest are at risk; human beings are losing their natural connection with Mother Nature. The propaganda platform of agroindustries, processed foods, and the pharmaceutical monopoly are largely responsible for this disconnection between humans and nature.

In communities in southern Peru, the Harawi planting songs are still preserved, likewise in several Andean communities in the central highlands of Ecuador the Haway harvest ritual song is practiced. These songs and prayers that if we want to place them within a universal concept will be called poetry, such as sound with microtonal scales, dance with vibrant colors that represent flowers and crops, reliefs on canvas, verse and prose in books. Art is integral, having connecting axes: the seed, the water, the territory, the communities, life in balance; therefore, our communities transfer this understanding and knowledge through it, that is how it has been, that is how it will continue to be.

That no one thinks for us, that no one speaks for us, that no one acts for us, is a premise of our communities, which is why we carry this communication tool; poetry, first to our wawas (children) and young people, so that they become attached to all the community elements, then to other territories inside and outside of Abya Yala. We consider it necessary to denounce the multiple forms of exploitation, extractivism, and dispossession to which the capitalist system subjects us, while posing solutions from the stewards of life in the territories.

Poetry walks with memory,

it lives in the communes and communities,

it is in the corn, in the chicha,

and it must be planted, it must be drunk

And it dreams!

poetry dreams of building a new world.

Theorizing eco-territorial media literacy

Eco-territorial media can inspire and inform various media education practices across the Americas. In the U.S., Mihailidis’ (2019) model of civic media literacy balances critical inquiry with value-oriented approaches that engage civic imagination, which is the ability to imagine alternatives to current social, political, and economic conditions. This counters the tendency in media literacy to focus too much on depersonalized mediated communication and technology that distances students from engaging their values or a sense of care towards people and communities. Moving beyond anthropocentricism, this can be deepened by “ecocultural identity,” a generative concept that “interrogates what it means to be human at the intersection of environmental and sociocultural struggles and resistance arising from patriarchal, imperialist, capitalist, and extractivist systems that exploit bodies, lands, waters, and well as information and outer space” (Castro-Sotomayor & Minoia, 2024, p. 98).

An extension of Paulo Freire's work to encompass environmental challenges, ecojustice, and environmental citizenship, “ecopedagogical literacy” entails the capacity to delve deeply into the localized, contextual origins, and consequences of environmental harm through praxis (Misiaszek, 2023, p. 53). In the context of el buen vivir, it’s important to strive for “post-development praxis” (Castro-Sotomayor & Minoia, 2024, p. 97) that builds on “the construction of non-universal but multiple epistemologies (pluriverse) resulting […] from the diversity of the existing cultures in Latin America” (Arcila Calderón et al., 2018, p. 190). Media educators should encourage “small” and “organic” media spaces that serve as localized opportunities to promote diverse epistemologies that counter “global” thinking embedded in Westernized education models (López, 2010). By connecting learning to challenges affecting local ecosystems, students acquire a more profound understanding of the societal and economic factors influencing their lives and within their communities (Evans, 2012; Freire, 2001; Kellner & Share, 2019).

Expanding upon localized education, focusing on social problems, critically analyzing information, creating counter-hegemonic messages, and promoting dialogue, post-development praxis establishes a tangible connection between critical pedagogy and real-world environmental struggles. Ecomedia literacy and critical ecopedagogy provide students with the tools to identify, critique, and demystify the often-overlooked power structures and worldviews that support them, thereby addressing political economy and ideologies of environmental exploitation. Within local contexts, students are encouraged to create alternative ecocentric media content and develop effective communication campaigns to address environmental challenges with an ethic of reciprocity and care inspired by concepts like sumak kawsay and eco-territorial media practice. As these various approaches crosspollinate across the Americas, an expanded sense of care for the more-than-human world blooms in media education.

Acknowledgements

The section “Poetry as eco-territorial media practice” was translated from Spanish by Laura Vargas-Díaz.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).