ABOUT
I am an Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College, and a member of the anti-extractive collective Comunálisis based in Quito, Ecuador.
My research focuses on Indigenous politics, environmental and feminist movements, struggles over territory and natural resource extraction, and decolonial thought in Latin America. My publications include peer-reviewed articles such as “Indigenous Women’s Activism, Ecofeminism, and Extractivism: Partial Connections in the Ecuadorian Amazon” (Politics and Gender, 2019) and “Decolonizing the Anti-Extractive Struggle: Amazonian Women’s Practices of Forest-Making in Ecuador” (Journal of International Women’s Studies, 2020), and essays that have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Alternautas, Verso and NACLA. I am co-editor of a translated book by the Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Eine Reflexion über Praktiken und Diskurse der Dekolonisierung (Unrast Verlag, 2018).
I am currently working on my book, Earthed Politics: The Mujeres Amazónicas' Fight against Extractivism in Ecuador, about the territorial struggle of the Amazonian Women, a group of Indigenous women leaders who have organized against oil and mining projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Previously, I was a Visitor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Member at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen, Germany, a Visiting Researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, and a Visiting Researcher at UC Davis. From 2020 to 2021 I was a Visiting Instructor of Anthropology and Sociology and of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen in Germany in 2021. My dissertation was awarded the Justus Liebig University Award and was the 2nd finalist in the ADLAF (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Lateinamerikaforschung) dissertation awards.