Joel E. Correia, PhD. I have worked for 20+ years alongside community partners in Latin American and East Africa to address some of the most challenging contemporary social and environmental challenges. My work is inspired by the transformative power of collaborative action, learning across epistemologies, and the urgency of today’s grand challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality, and resurgent authoritarianism.

As a publicly-engaged scholar, I strive to leverage research as a tool to inform academic and popular knowledge while supporting more just futures. I am a human-environment geographer trained at the crossroads of political ecology, development geographies, and critical social theory who transgresses disciplinary boundaries through collaborative field-based studies, action research, and engaged teaching practice. I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado USA. Before joining CSU, I was an faculty member at the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies and Tropical Conservation and Development Program (2018-2023).

To date, I have had the opportunity to secure and manage $2.1+ million in competitive grants and fellowships to advance innovative research, including support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Andes-Amazon Initiative, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Fulbright. In January 2025, the Human-Environment and Geographic Sciences Program and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate of NSF selected my CAREER proposal for funding–the “most prestigious award” for early career faculty from NSF. However, DOGE officers at NSF deemed my work on climate change and Indigenous well-being not aligned with current political interests and tanked the project.

Silvia de Melo Futada, PhD Candidate in Interdisciplinary Ecology at University of Florida. Co-Advised with Dr. Karen Kainer. Research with Waimiri Atroari Indigenous communities in the northern Brazilian Amazon focused on community-based conservation through critical transdisciplinary science and communal resurgence and autonomies in the wake of genocide. More information here, here, and here.

Sheyla Ríos Galeano, PhD Student in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. Research in Paraguay at the Chaco-Pantanal interface focused on assessing human geographies of fire use and management through mixed-methods research the bridges geospatial analysis with social science to advance integrated fire management. More information here and here.

Carlos Urgilés Verdugo, PhD Student in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. Research in the Ecuadorian Amazon with Siona and Siekopai Indigenous communities focused on investigating dynamics of environmental governance and differing conditions that shape territorial stewardship to facilitate community-based conservation planning. More information here, here, and here.

Dr. Marcelo Santos Rocha da Silva. MA Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Thesis: The Political Ecology of a Subnational Jurisdictional REDD+ in the Brazilian Amazon (Acre). Together, we co-authored the 2022 Eric Wolf Prize winning paper based on Marcelo’s thesis research. Marcelo is currently faculty at Modesto Community College.

Colleen Abel. Masters in Sustainable Development Practice at the University of Florida. Practicum: Migrant Empowerment and Opportunities as part of the Rural Livelihood Study in Western Honduras. Co-Advised with Dr. Rebecca Williams.

Britany Green. MA Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Thesis: Analyzing Indigeneity in Oaxacan Social Movements: The APPO and Popular Resistance.

Juan David Rojas. MA Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Thesis: El infierno en medio del paraiso: Migration, Crime & the Frontier in the Darien Gap. Juan is currently a political analyst and journalist contributing to several media outlets on contemporary issues in Latin America.

Laura Botero Arellano. MA Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Thesis: Finding spaces to heal: Exploring the everyday life experiences of an Indigenous community resisting the mining frontiers of the Venezuelan Amazon. Co-Advised with Dr. Rebecca Hanson.

Laura is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at University of Texas Austin.
Her research examines how emerging mining frontiers are reshaping Uwottüja Indigenous territories along the Venezuelan–Colombian Amazonian border. While these territories are often understood as protected through Indigenous governance and longstanding relations with the land, she explores how extractive pressures take hold from within. Moving beyond accounts that focus primarily on environmental impacts or territorial defense, her work foregrounds the relational and embodied dimensions of extraction.

Drawing on feminist political ecology and Indigenous geographies, she analyzes how mining reorganizes everyday life by transforming kinship relations, care practices, mobility patterns, and place-based systems of knowledge. She is particularly interested in how these shifts are entangled with the intensification of gendered and intimate forms of violence. By centering women’s experiences, her research conceptualizes extractive frontiers as embodied processes, produced through the disruption and reconfiguration of social and territorial relations.