My research investigates relationships between landscape change, natural resource governance, and societal inequalities with a focus on Indigenous and front-line communities in Latin America. I am currently focused on three core phenomena: 1) relationships between rapid frontier development, impacts of climate change, and the outcomes of adaptation and mitigation initiatives; 2) the effects of adaptive Indigenous territorial stewardship practices on biocultural conservation; 3) the flood-drought-fire nexus and its impacts on social-ecological systems in threatened forest lands.
My work is transdisciplinary, rooted in qualitative social science and public political ecology but transgresses traditional disciplinary boundaries through diverse mixed-methods and engaged in-situ research with front-line communities, human rights advocates, policy makers, and scientists. I believe that research should serve a public good and not be constrained to academia. Consequently, I closely collaborate with partners “on the ground” to create actionable outcomes and science that serves. To date, much of that work has focused on the Gran Chaco and Amazon Forests of South America. I employ a suite of methods that range from ethnography and legal analysis to the use of drones, Q-method, and visual media.
Below, please find information about several of my research projects and areas of interest.
Current Projects
Resilient Socio-Environmental Systems: Indigenous Territories in the Face of Change
I am a Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems grant (2021-2025). 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
As a 2019 UF Global Fellow, I expanded my research program to begin investigating land-use change, expanding extractive frontiers, and the infrastructure development with attention to climate and environmental (in)justice in the Gran Chaco–one of the world’s most threatened forest frontiers. My Fulbright Scholar award (2022-2023) supports in-depth field research on this project through collaborations with partners from Indigenous communities, leading human rights organizations, and the Universidad Católica Center for Anthropological Studies in Paraguay.
Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous land rights and the fight for environmental justice in Paraguay’s Chaco
As a 2021 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, I completed my first book that University of California Press published in April 2023. The work builds from longterm research with Enxet and Sanapaná in Paraguay’s Chaco. The project traces the formation of racial geographies that result from settler colonialism and its extractive imperative yet attends to the future-oriented resistance of Indigenous peoples who are renewing relations with territories once stolen through the pursuit of environmental justice.
The e-book is available for free reading and downloads here.
Core Research themes
Indigenous Rights
Biocultural Conservation
Environmental & Climate Justice
Development Geographies
Political Ecology
Transdisciplinarity
Joel E. Correia 