New edited volume co-edited and co-authored by Clara De La Hoz

A new collective volume, "Ensayos sobre migraciones por razones climáticas y otras causas socioambientales: Aportes desde las realidades latinoamericanas," has just been published by the Universidad Externado de Colombia. Clara De La Hoz Del Real is one of its three coordinators, together with Deysi Ofelmina Jerez-Ramírez and Gustavo Wilches-Chaux, and also contributes to the volume as an author.

The book brings together ten chapters and an appendix addressing climate-related migration and displacement, as well as other forms of environmentally driven mobility, across Latin America. The contributions combine legal, sociological, anthropological and environmental perspectives, with cases from Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Honduras and Panama.

Clara’s contribution is particularly close to a research trajectory that connects her doctoral work, PREFER and her continuing interest in the lived experience of displacement. One of the chapters examines the social effects of the institutional categorisation of people displaced by a disaster, drawing on the case of Campo de la Cruz in Colombia. It looks beyond displacement as a physical movement to consider what happens to identity, social status and recognition when people are displaced and subsequently defined through institutional categories such as damnificados.

This resonates strongly with questions explored within PREFER: how situations experienced as deeply disruptive or potentially terminal are understood by those who live through them, and how institutional categories can shape — and sometimes constrain — the ways in which these experiences are recognised. It is also a reminder of the longer research trajectories that feed into PREFER: some of the questions pursued within the project did not begin with PREFER, but have continued to develop alongside it and through the encounters it has made possible.

Editorial note: This publication is presented here as part of the broader research trajectories of PREFER team members. It is not, unless explicitly stated, a PREFER project output or publication.

The book is available from the Universidad Externado de Colombia.