What are we up to now?
Resilient Socio-Environmental Systems: Indigenous Territories in the Face of Change
Correia is a Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems grant (2021-2026). Based in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the study integrates ecology, socio-environmental modeling, human geography, and spatial sciences to investigate Indigenous territorial management strategies and their effects on system resilience. Our team comprises a collaboration between U.S. and Ecuadorian academics and Indigenous communities. The project is locally known by the name “Con Territorio: Conciencia, Convivencia y Conservación Comunitaria.”
Building the future: Infrastructure, climate change, and environmental justice in the Gran Chaco
Since 2019, Correia has been investigating an infrastructure boom that is rapidly changing the Paraguayan Chaco with serious implications on the Gran Chaco region. Anchored by the regional integration project known as the “Ruta Bioceanica”, the Paraguayan Chaco is now the site of the largest investment in road infrastructure development in Latin America with a series of new roads and bridges that promise to covert the region to the new “Panama Canal” of South America. With support of a Fulbright Scholar award (2022-2023) and several other grants, Correia has conducted long-term ethnographic research on this process of change. Several publications are now in progress based on this work.
Collaborative Development of Tools for Conservation Area Tracking and Indigenous Stewardship Assessment
With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Correia and colleagues are 1) building a transparent, open access cloud-based spatial system for tracking conservation area designations in the Ecuadorian Amazon; 2) generating a synthesized knowledge base to inform scalable, culturally grounded Indigenous stewardship indicators; 3) co-designing and piloting an Indigenous stewardship assessment tool with five nationalities in Ecuador; and 4) developing a national strategy to scale the tool’s adoption and integration into finance and policy frameworks. Together, these efforts will improve data quality, inform equitable conservation strategies, and strengthen recognition of Indigenous stewardship in alignment with national and global biodiversity goals.
The Matter of Islands: Negotiating Terrains in Archipelagoes of Possibility in India
Led by Neha Kohli, this research project takes seriously islands as socially constructed and material spaces where tensions and affinities across terrains of state architecture, the land, and the sea, locate as well as dislocate islands as colonial renderings of spaces in the service of the mainland. It makes three interventions to critical geographic scholarship at the nexus of political geography, political ecology, and island studies. First, it shows that postcolonial India’s territorial practices in the Nicobar Islands are shaped by moralizing and racializing discursive practices that mirror settler like policies and that while they have largely sustained, have not remained unchallenged. Second, it shows that pursuing field work in islands as an embodied process can be revealing of contradictory articulations of territory and the bearing of the affective and material lives of bureaucracy on the biopolitics of territorial management. Third, it shows that the Tarik and Payuh Islanders’ interactions and practices in their homelands and across the Andaman and Nicobar Islands demonstrate the importance of reimagining sovereignty as a diverse terrain of political possibilities, both as insular and as archipelagic spaces of relationality.
Women’s Care in Mangrove and Clam Conservation: Rethinking Nature-Based Solutions for Environmental and Gender Justice
Led by Paula Cepeda, this research project centers women’s care in mangrove and clam conservation in the Pacific region of Colombia. Working collaboratively with Afro-Colombian women clam harvesters, examining perceptions and experiences of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in Colombia, and drawing on the critical lenses of decolonial and feminist political ecology, Paula explores the meanings and interpretations of care within the women–clams–mangroves system. She examines how NbS, through participatory processes and critical perspectives, can address women’s priorities, support care, advance conservation, and offer alternative approaches to environmental challenges. The project aims to evidence how NbS with critical lenses are innovative, transformative, and contribute to environmental and gender justice in conservation.
