Congratulations to Political Science PhD Candidate Laura Primeau, winner of the The Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) 2023 Graduate Essay Prize. Her paper is “Making Law, Making Worlds: Ontological Openings through Jurisgenesis in the Case of the Mayan Train in Mexico”.
In this paper, Laura Primeau traces how indigenous communities navigate international human rights norms as part of territorial struggles. The author offers a nuanced account of how indigenous groups accept certain elements of national and international legal governance while rejecting others, creating new strategies to challenge the silencing of alternative ways of being and knowing. This highly original paper is well researched and clearly argued. It makes a valuable contribution on a timely issue that is prevalent across the Global South – environmental social conflicts generated by neoliberal megaprojects – by capturing the limitations inherent in Western notions of human rights for communities in resistance.