Speaker: Daniela Sclavo - Université libre de Bruxelles
Dates: 24 & 25 August 2026
Venue: National Autonomous University of Mexico - Mexico City

On 24 August 2026, Daniela Sclavo participated in the colloquium Territorio, maíz y acción colectiva en América Latina (Territory, Maize and Collective Action in Latin America) organised by the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CIALC) and the Center for Research in Environmental Geography (CIGA) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As part of the panel Agricultura, alimentación y territorios locales (Agriculture, Food and Local Territories), her presentation, “Maíz bolita y encuentro colectivo: espacios de transformación comunitaria en Santo Domingo Tomaltepec, Oaxaca,” drew on the ongoing collaborative work of SeedsValues and Cocina Colaboratorio in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. Taking the native maíz bolita as an entry point, the presentation explored how its continued cultivation is sustained through a wider repertoire of relationships involving seeds, cultivators, cooks, soils, climate, culinary practices, memories and forms of collective care. The presentation reflected particularly on the series of encounters developed with community members throughout 2026, considering these not only as spaces for sharing knowledge, but also as sites from which new relations and possibilities for collective action can emerge. Participatory workshops around native maize and Zapotec language, the co-creation of a relational milpa calendar, the development of a community book, and the establishment of a diverse milpa with increasingly rare local maize varieties illustrate how collaborative research can move between reflection, experimentation and action. Through these experiences, the presentation proposed thinking about crop diversity not as a fixed collection of varieties to be conserved, but as something continually made and remade through relationships, practices and collective processes that connect seeds, people and territories.