The Hubs are reference teams on priority topics for the region, made up of Colansa members who share a common interest in one of these topics and wish to work together on its development.
The Colansa Gender and Intersectionality Hub is an interdisciplinary group that brings together researchers, professionals, activists, and people interested in addressing gender inequalities and their intersections across food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The gender and intersectionality agenda in food systems is at a critical juncture in the region. The advance of conservative policies, the weakening of regulatory frameworks for protection, and the persistence of structural inequalities make it urgent to build networks that produce knowledge, promote advocacy, and strengthen capacities to address these challenges. These inequalities do not operate in isolation: race, class, territory, and other dimensions intersect with gender to produce specific forms of exclusion and vulnerability within food systems.
The Hub recognizes that unequal gender relations operate intersectionally, profoundly influencing every aspect of the food system: from food production and access to care work, consumption, food security, and nutritional health. Inequalities are often rendered invisible and normalized, disproportionately affecting women, sexual and gender minorities, Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, and other historically marginalized groups.
The group’s central purpose is to integrate a gender rights and intersectionality perspective into research, policies, and actions related to food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean, building collective knowledge and strengthening capacities across the region.
To this end, the Hub seeks to create a collective space for exchange and knowledge generation, with the aim of bringing these gaps to light, promoting more equitable practices, and contributing to the development of fairer, more inclusive, and sustainable food systems in the region.
The mission of the Gender and Intersectionality Hub is to integrate a gender andintersectionality perspective across food systems in ways that benefit historicallyexcluded communities and territories. The Hub seeks to strengthen internalcapacities by promoting collaborative and interdisciplinary work and bygenerating evidence-based proposals that make structural inequalities in foodsystems visible and help transform them.
The Gender and Intersectionality Hub will become the leading entity in LatinAmerica in promoting gender and intersectionality perspectives throughresearch, policy, and action. The Hub will serve as a technical reference withinColansa regarding evidence generation, advocacy, and decision-making aimed atmainstreaming gender and intersectionality approaches in food systems, withthe goal of promoting the articulation of knowledge, leadership, andtransformative actions that contribute to building fairer, more inclusive, andmore sustainable public policies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
All Colansa members can register for the hubs. Just click “login” and sign in with your email and password.
If you are not yet a Colansa member and would like to take part in the hubs, become part of Colansa.
Members are expected to participate actively in meetings, sharing progress on their research related to the Hub or their political or advocacy actions; to contribute to the group’s sustainability by seeking funding sources to meet its objectives; to give their opinion on the prioritization of the Hub’s topics and activities; to support the external dissemination of activities; to identify needs and propose possible solutions; and to review and approve the annual activity report and the financial report prepared by the board.
Additionally, graduate students are expected to take on a more active role in carrying out the Hub’s activities, such as events, the development of informational materials, and information updates, ideally linked to their research work.
