Alejandra Watanabe-Farro
Alejandra’s research interests bridge interdisciplinary fields, including political ecology, human geography, and critical communications studies, with a focus on environmental and climate justice, socio-ecological distribution conflicts, and resource governance. Her research has taken various forms throughout her professional and academic career but generally engages with the question of how hegemonic discourses on environment and development shape the production of space and subjectivities.
Her work focuses on the political economy of climate, emphasizing the examination of institutions and power structures that perpetuate historical inequalities affecting rural and Indigenous territories in Latin America, specifically in the Andean region. Informed by a decolonial approach to the study of postcolonial nations in Latin America, she explores the meaning-making processes that create territories of extraction and appropriation, as well as the role of race—particularly whiteness—in the transnational accumulation of capital.
She was part of the founding cohort of graduate students in the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UCSC, where she led undergraduate students in open-source investigations to uncover and verify human rights violations in the Americas. She is also a co-founder and member of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at UCSC.
