Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

In 2016, Colombia was declared the country with the largest number of internally displaced people (IDP) due to armed violence in the world. While the national government has implemented numerous restorative initiatives within its broader peace-building frameworks, compensation and reparation for IDP have been proven insufficient. As current scholarship has shown, impoverishment and re-victimization are constants in the quotidian experience of IDP. Based on ten-months of ethnographic fieldwork at Medellin’s District 13 in early 2011, this presentation studies IDP’s spatial narratives on security, focusing on how the category of “Home” is deployed both as a space for shelter but also for the emergence of life. By contrasting narratives on their places of expulsion and reception, I identify an incommensurable relationship between human bodies and the environment that, in turn, indicate subtle forms of violence that emerge once this complex articulation is forcibly dislocated. What does it mean to be dis-placed, as an ontological experience? How is the after-life of (dis)placement being understood? What are the possibilities for the emergence of new forms of being? By grounding these theoretical concerns to the lived experiences of the internally displaced population, I seek to raise a set of fundamental questions on the ethical and political imperatives that emerge when considering the relationship between human corporeality and more-than-human environments. These questions, I argue, are much needed in current in conversations that revolve around the promises and shortfalls of ongoing peace-building initiatives in Colombia.