FRONTERAS Collective

Transdisciplinary research for just climate & environmental futures

The FRONTERAS Collective at Colorado State University conducts transdisciplinary research on extractivism, Indigenous rights, and forest frontiers across the Américas.

The FRONTERAS Collective is comprised of a diverse interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners committed to critical, transdisciplinary research rooted in thinking across epistemologies, leveraging creative methodologies, and working closely with partners in the places where we conduct our work.

Learn more about the people who make up the collective!

Joel E. Correia is the principal investigator and director of the FRONTERAS Collective. He is a critical human-environment geographer with 20+ years of applied research and collaboration experience across the Américas. Correia works at the intersection of political ecology and development geographies to advance transformative research on social-ecological challenges of climate change adaptation, social inequality, and conservation in the Gran Chaco and Amazon forests.

The Acronym

Why FRONTERAS?

Forest Frontiers These sites are the frontlines of climate change action and biocultural diversity conservation. They are the contested edges and sites of friction where extractivism, environmental change, and resistance rework state-society relations in the Amazon, Gran Chaco, & beyond.

Rights Indigenous rights to land and territory. Ruptures between states and citizens when rights are denied. The radical potential of rights for “nature”

pOlitical Ecologies Critical approaches to studying knowledges, power, politics, and uneven geographies of access and control over “the environment” in support of more just futures

Natures Plural, relational, and contested: rejecting the notion of singular Nature in favor of the multiple natures communities live with, defend, & embody

Transdisciplinarity Working with and across diverse epistemologies by co-producing knowledge with partners in and outside of academia to support public good

Extractivism The political economic processes reshaping frontier regions and harmful dynamics of knowledge production

Relationality Reciprocal obligations and connections across human and more-than-human worlds in method, ethics, & theory

Américas Our intellectual and geographic home: working from and with Latin American traditions, not just about them

Stewardship Indigenous and community-led care for territories, futures, and the relations that sustain life

Research

Our collective works to identify pathways toward more just social-ecological futures — futures defined not by extraction and dispossession but by territorial care, reciprocity, and self-determination. Our work is rooted in political ecology, critical development studies, and conservation social science approaches, but it refuses to stay within disciplinary lines. We mobilize diverse methods from, ethnography, legal analysis, ecological assessment, geospatial analysis, visual media, and participatory methods to co-produce knowledge alongside Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, human rights advocates, and scientists working on the front lines of social-ecological change.

Climate & Environmental Justice: Adaptation, loss & damage

Indigenous rights to land & territory: Dispossession, resistance & resurgence

Political ecologies of development:

Natures, extractivism, power, & access

Biocultural conservation:

Stewardship, reciprocity & self-determination