Amazônia Latitude is a scholarly digital journal and magazine peer-reviewed dedicated to studies of Amazon and Pan-Amazon region, culture and environment. It is published jointly by of the Program of Portuguese at Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University the Laboratory of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinarity in The Amazon of the Society and Culture Post-Graduation Program of the Federal University of Amazonas (Laboratório de Ciências Sociais e Interdisciplinaridade na Amazônia do Programa de Pós-Graduação Sociedade e Cultura da Universidade Federal do Amazonas).
The magazine’s creator and founding members subscribe to a perspective defending the environment and society within the scope of environmental humanities thought, widening the reach of voices of scientific, cultural and socially critical manifestations. Expressions of the languages of science and art, and popular representations of individuals acting for social transformation of reality from an environmental perspective will be prioritized in Amazônia Latitude. Opening space for critical debate and increasing its dissemination, with the recognition of the legitimacy of points of view with this focus, is the objective commitment of the magazine.
Amazônia Latitude is a critical platform, with the intention of cultivating wide scale reading of the region, in its historical, sociocultural and political processes with the aim of examining and demonstrating the development of slow violence against Amazonian cultures and lands.
The production of scientific and artistic knowledge in this vehicle, is positioned in the canon of eco-critical perspectives, epistemically guided by the rationale of the Slow Violence approach, and by strategic categories of Slow Seeing and Visual Sovereignty. Therefore, these theoretical and procedural orientations constitute a form of producing relational knowledge as an act of human intervention in self-understanding and enlightenment. An interdependent connection between culture and action in which the cultural premise has the causal power of agency is included as a factor in this dynamic, insofar as it connects to/provokes understanding and produces social action. It is also an instrument of opposition to the predatory mechanisms of slow violence in the region as it produces and demonstrates points of view against the silencing of the voices of Amazonian subjects within and outside the disciplinary and academic field. Breaking down the barriers between science and humanity, narrating the past and imagining the future with the commitment to publishing innovative studies and increasing the space for understanding the Amazon. The process of understanding the region in Amazônia Latitude, focusing on scientific and artistic culture, and consists of providing a place for diversity of ways and means of registering research, opinions and visions of nature and culture beyond the institutional limits of specialized fields, through essays, articles, images, videos, book reviews, etc.
Through this precise theoretical focus, there is ample dialogue, within and beyond the academic field of intellectual formation and intervention in society, besides the intention of being a reciprocal relationship of enlightenment between science and humanity.
Therefore, foreseeing other possibilities for the diffusion of knowledge is a task for the founders of Amazônia Latitude.
Amazônia Latitude, as a platform and instrument of knowledge in action, has the following objectives:
- To produce a new episteme of thinking on the Amazon differentiated from the traditional amalgamated media in the region. To think about the Amazon scientifically in the seeking of dialogue between Academia and society on a new perception of observing, feeling and interpreting the Amazonian region.
- To rethink the imagined Amazon with an eco-critical episteme.
- To discuss the Amazon from a bias of “Slow Violence” — which is a canon of thought, albeit ontological and epistemic, and of “Slow Seeing” and “Visual sovereignty” as strategic concepts.
- To recover, discuss and define the concept of agency in modernity, and maintain a discussion on it within the platform. (That is, not only define the concept of agency, but socially produce agency. In other words, make others think and recreate other possibilities. In the case of Amazonian society, for example, enable the indigenous peoples to recover their agency and visual sovereignty, etc.)
- To think on how the concept of “Visual Sovereignty” is opposed to the process of “Slow Violence”. Is it through the empowerment of individuals?
- To transpose the sequencing of ideas into themes, agendas and interviews, in the quality of the interlocutors and institutions involved.
- To produce numerous “relational processes” with knowledge (for example: a cartoon that expresses a dimension of contemporary world geopolitics; a text that expresses concern for the Amazon through slow seeing and a definition of how this slow violence is expressed in the text; a film; a documentary reporting the Amazonian region and a clear and current interpretation of the Amazon).
- To connect Slow Seeing and the regional culture.
- To think on how the Amazon can overcome a culture of 500 years of silencing and national underdevelopment.