About JSET

The Just Social-Ecological Transformations in Latin America Program (JSET) draws together social and natural scientists alongside practitioners and frontline communities to foster a transdisciplinary community of praxis to support enduring social-environmental sustainability in Latin America by centering justice-based approaches in this work.

We are dedicated to learning about, understanding, and facilitating just and sustainable transformations within Latin America's diverse landscapes. We integrate social and ecological perspectives, prioritize community engagement and knowledge co-production, and foreground questions of justice to address the complex challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality.

JSET is based at Colorado State University in Fort Collins in the Warner College of Natural Resources.

Dr. Joel E. Correia and Dr. Andrea Baudoin-Farah are co-Directors .

The JSET Logo: A Visual Grammar of Transformation

The JSET logo draws on a visual grammar rooted in the ecological and cultural landscapes of the Américas.

This symbol brings together elements that represent life in constant movement: clouds that evoke thoughts, people who migrate and transform, birds that cross skies without borders and seeds with possibility of germination, the memory of territories, and new possibilities. It also features the body of a snake that evokes the transformative capacity of the territories where JSET collaborators focus their work.

We also designed this as a statement of epistemological commitment rooted in critical transdiciplinary approaches to working with and across ways of knowing. What kinds of knowledge matter? Whose knowledge matter? How does knowledge travel? What does it take to create spaces where different knowledges are valued and in dialogue to inform action for more just futures? These questions emerge from long-term place-based work we do with partners and collaborators in the Américas; they also resonate with critical debates in political ecology, science studies, Indigenous geographies, and engaged scholarship.

Together, these elements articulate what JSET means by "just social-ecological transformations": a community of praxis that is transdisciplinary in its methods, pluralist in its epistemology, and accountable to the peoples and ecologies whose futures are at stake. The logo does not romanticize this work. It intends to represent the work as mobile, rooted, alive, and necessarily incomplete, always in the process of shedding what no longer serves and carrying new growth toward places it has not yet reached.

Sara Kulli created the logo in conversation with JSET co-directors. Find more of their work here.

Click on the core elements below if you want to read more.

  • Description text goes At the center of the composition is a serpent rendered in geometric and chromatic styles found across diverse Indigenous artistic traditions of Latin America. The serpent is a symbol present in many comologies across the region, from the Quetzalcóatl, Amaru, and Kukulkán to Sachamama not because these cosmologies or the roles played by the serpent are equivalent or interchangeable, but because the serpent's biological reality (a creature that sheds its skin as it grows) makes it a figure for thinking about transformation. Transdisciplinary approaches take transformation seriously in a comparable way, not as the replacement of one paradigm by another, but as the iterative, sometimes friction-filled process of reconstituting how we ask questions, who participates in asking them, and whose ways of knowing are recognized as legitimate in the first place. The serpent, in this sense, is not just a symbol of ecological change but of the kind of deep methodological growth and institutional boundary spanning that knowledge co-production demands.here

  • The clouds evoke "flying rivers" (ríos voladores) — the atmospheric moisture corridors generated by Amazonian evapotranspiration that carry water vapor thousands of kilometers, sustaining rainfall and agricultural systems across much of South America. Scientifically documented and yet still underappreciated in mainstream environmental governance, the flying rivers are a fitting emblem for transdisciplinary work: phenomena that are real, consequential, and cross-cutting, but that remain invisible when inquiry is organized by narrow disciplinary or jurisdictional boundaries. They remind us that social-ecological systems are constituted by flows and connections that precede and exceed any single framework for understanding them and that meaningful knowledge production must be scaled accordingly.

  • The two birds in the composition speak to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called an "ecology of knowledges", the proposition that the epistemic monocultures produced by Northern academic institutions are insufficient to address the complexity of social-ecological crises, and that a more just science requires recognizing and entering into dialogue with the plural knowledge traditions that have long attended to these systems.

    The yellow bird carries a sprouting corn seed. Maize (Zea mays) is not merely a crop; it is a species co-produced over millennia through Indigenous agricultural knowledge, a nutritional foundation for hundreds of millions of people, and a living repository of technical and cosmological understanding embedded in its thousands of landraces. That the seed is already sprouting matters: it signals that these knowledge traditions are not relics to be documented and archived, but living, adaptive systems with their own generative logics, precisely what an ecology of knowledges approach insists must be brought into conversation with, rather than subordinated to, formal scientific frameworks.

    The red hummingbird carries another sprouting seed and appears poised to release it elsewhere. Hummingbirds are among the most effective pollinators in the Americas, and their role in the logo frames knowledge transmission as an ecological act: situated, relational, and oriented toward new growth in new places. This resonates with the transdisciplinary ideal of knowledge that is produced not just for academic audiences but with and for communities, crossing boundaries between university and territory, between peer-reviewed publication and local practice.