Tamara Ortega Uribe
Tamara Ortega-Uribe is a PhD student in the Politics Department at UCSC. She is a Sociologist and holds a MA in History from the University of Chile. She has developed her academic career mostly in Chile, as a university professor and researcher. She has done research into social participation in decision-making processes, environmental policies, criminalization of poverty, territorialization processes, and social movements for political change. Tamara has worked as a consultant in governmental agencies, developing critical knowledge about public policies and state power. She has also coordinated social projects with non-governmental organizations focused mainly on political education for community leaders and activists in Chile. Tamara is a member of the Emerge Foundation in Chile, where she has developed participatory research and social projects with community leaders and socio-environmental organizations of highly polluted areas in Chile, known as sacrifice zones. Her research and academic career have been funded by different scholarships and awards, from the Inter American Institute for Global Change Research, Fulbright-BIO-Education USA, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF), and the Tinker Foundation. Her current research interests are focused on political and environmental dimensions of extractivist patterns in Latin America. Her research takes a holistic and multi-level approach that borrows from comparative politics, critical theory and decolonial environmental justice perspectives to understand how local and political conflicts are embedded in global environmental political systems. As an active member of social and political organizations, her academic inquiries are related to understanding and addressing environmental injustices in subnational territories, and the mutating nature of the neoliberal and ecological crisis. Her academic contributions seek to link up critical thinking with collective and grassroots knowledge for social justice.
