My research and teaching program centers on the intersections of Indigenous politics, environmental justice, human rights, extractive development, and biocultural conservation in Latin America.
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, and social inequality.
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.
At Colorado State, I am co-Director of a new transdisicplinary initiative: the Just Social-Ecological Transformations in Latin America Program (JSET). JSET is a community of academics, practitioners, and students working in, of, and from Latin America who seek to create new approaches to enduring social-environmental challenges by centering justice in that work. We are a collective of human geographers, interdisciplinary ecologists, economists, biologists, hydrologists, foresters, ecologists, ecosystem scientists, sustainability scholars, Center Directors, and more who believe that collaborative, integrative applied research is necessary to confront the ongoing climate, environmental, social, economic, and biodiversity challenges Latin America confronts. We are building a community of praxis to leverage science through collaborative, applied research to support social-ecological justice and longterm wellbeing.
Before joining Colorado State, I was an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and core faculty member in the Tropical Conservation and Development as well as the Masters of Sustainable Development Practice programs at the University of Florida (August 2018 – December 2022). I was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Arizona. My PhD in Geography is from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Joel E. Correia 