Introduction: Framing the Spaces of Territorialisation in Latin America—A Complex Labour of Herding Cats

This chapter introduces a collection of original geographical research on territorial processes in diverse settings throughout Latin America. Most of the works were first brought together in a pair of sessions organised by two of the co-authors at the 35th Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers held in San Jose Costa Rica, the guiding purpose of which was to illustrate ‘how territory and territorialization are materialised in practice in Latin American contexts’. Rather than aiming to establish a unified theoretical vision, the collection seeks to integrate the rich complexity and wide ranging empirical applications of the increasingly important concepts of territory, territoriality and territorialisation. The book covers a broad geographical spread in terms of the authors, the institutions and the places they have elected to work in, which is reflected in a diverse range of thematic, theoretical and methodological perspectives behind each work.