The Un/Disciplined Feminist Political Ecology Lab is an interconnected network of scholars who work across the Américas and in transnational borderlands. We share common frameworks for collaboratively partnering with communities and offering critical perspectives to global challenges. Scholars and activists in this lab converge work in innovative ways. We work across place-based and digital interfaces, drawing upon transdisciplinary scholarship and feminist political ecology. We also find kinship with decolonial scholarship, critical ethnography, feminist science and technology studies, and justice work. All of our engagements and entanglements seek to support, amplify, or expand storytelling from spaces which customarily are not represented in dominant discourses and at the same time disrupt longstanding narratives to support transformative change. Methodologically, we critically engage with emerging and standard digital and media-based technologies to enhance and accentuate data sovereignty, collection, management, visualization, and circulation. We have a strong pulse of engaged threads within and across our projects. We are learners and recognize our work is iterative, requires deep listening, and demands a thoughtful responsiveness. We love and are inspired by Terra Común, the Design Justice Network, CLEAR lab, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, CAMRA Lab and the Urban Ethnography Lab at UT Austin. We often work alongside Dr. Kimberly Marion-Suiseeya’s Lab at Northwestern University and our joint Presence to Influence team.

Check out all the fabulous projects below!

Shradha Naveen snaveen@purdue.edu

As an Indian girl who has grown up in East Africa, Shradha has been fascinated with the intersection between the natural environment, culture and economic development and how these cycles and processes are interdependent but also influence each other. This fascination led her to do her BSc in Environment and Sustainability at Keele University, UK, after which she did her MA in Environment, Development and Policy at Sussex University, UK. Through her study, she has been drawn to issues of natural resource management (particularly water) and waste management as she sees them as the most pressing issues in the geographic areas she has researched. Her most recent work has looked at sanitation in India, working with an NGO in Karnataka to document best practices in the outreach, processing, and implementation of government sanitation schemes in India. She is particularly interested in a gendered understanding of the triple bottom line. 

Camila Coelho, she/her ccoelho@purdue.edu

Camila Coelho is a researcher born in Belém, Brazil, a city in the heart of the Amazon. Currently, her research interests focus on the digital transition in Indigenous communities, especially the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó, and the implications of this transition in the pursuit of sovereignty. Her goal is to investigate how these communities are incorporating new technologies, such as WhatsApp, and how these tools are transforming cultural and social practices. Camila’s research seeks to understand the institutional logics emerging from ancestral relationships and the transitions toward a more digitally connected world from the perspective of Indigenous communities.

Camila holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering (University Center of Pará) and Journalism (Federal University of Pará), a master’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology (Federal University of Pará, Brazil), and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. In her previous studies, Camila explored the relationship between digital inclusion and small communities across Brazil. She has worked as a researcher at the Federal University of Pará and is now focused on connecting her academic research with tangible outcomes for the communities she collaborates with, promoting projects that value traditional knowledge and the aspirations of local populations.

Juan Manuel Arévalo, he/him arevalov@purdue.edu

Juan Manuel Arévalo is a researcher born in the region of Cauca, Colombia, a diverse territory of multifarious social movements. At present, he is working on two topics: grassroots organizations and sustainability, in order to discover whether an organizational ontological transition that boosts habitable worlds is possible, and if so, how to address it. With this goal in mind, Juan Manuel is looking to the contributions of social movements in Cauca, as sustainability transitions in the Global South have not been profoundly studied, especially within the context of organizational and habitability frameworks. His current research revolves around institutional logics that emerge from the ancestrality of Indigenous movements in Cauca; relationships among institutional logics and habitability transitions; and translation of logics into organizing terms. Juan Manuel holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (University of Cauca, Colombia), a diploma in Social Research Methods and Techniques (Latin American Social Sciences Faculty, FLACSO Brazil), a master’s degree in Cross-Functional Development Studies (University of Cauca, Colombia), and a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology: Sustainable Citizenship (Utrecht University, The Netherlands). In his previous studies, Juan Manuel has investigated the relationship between company and development in Popayán (Cauca) from different perspectives, as well as social movements in Cauca that are committed to ontological transitions toward habitability, including an ethnographic exercise in the Misak Indigenous community. Juan Manuel has worked as professor and researcher at the University of Cauca, rector of the Siglo XXI school, and is the founder and director of the research corporation Gnosis OS. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University.  

 

Former Lab Members

MS and PhD Students

Sarah Huang. 2020. “If We Can’t Grow Rice Then What?”: Farming Livelihoods in the Production of Vietnam’s Rice Farming Landscapes. PhD. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology. https://www.linkedin.com/in/huangsarahd

Sarah Huang. 2016. Food, Identity, and Place: Considerations of livelihood Resilience in the Study of Food Security. MS. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology.

Catalina Garcia Acevedo. 2021. Autistic Adults and their Intersections: An Anthropological approach to cultural conceptions of disability in Indigenous, campesinos and urban families in Colombia. MS. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology.

Virginia Pleasant. 2021. There’s More to Corn in Indiana: Smallholder and Alternative Farmers as a Locus of Resilience. PhD. Purdue University. American Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts.

Ingrid Ramón Parra. 2021. Menire Making Movies: Participatory Video Production Among Kayapo Women in the Brazilian Amazon. PhD. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingridramonparra

Diana Steele Jones. 2015. Geographies of Difference: Examining Race and Place through Amazonian Migrant Livelihoods in Cusco, Peru. PhD. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology. https://dianasteele.squarespace.com/

Joshua Van Drei. 2014. Historical Configurations of Knowledge among the Iñupiat in Arctic Alaska. MS. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology. 2014

Evelyn LaTour, 2012. Mining at the Interface of NEPA and the U.S. Public: Applying Anthropology for a more contextualized Corporate Social Responsibility. MS. Purdue University. Department of Anthropology.

Past Visiting Scholars

Eduardo Rafael Galvão, Geographer and Brazilian Indigenista

Maria Gabriela Fink Salgado, Social and Environmental Consultant, Biologist and Master in Ecology (National Institute of Amazonian Research-INPA), Co-founder of Kapran_arte www.kapranarte.com

Pati Kayapó, Filmmaker, Béture Collective and Kôkôjãgoti Filmmaking Collective, @patikayapo

Diego Soares da Silveira, Professor, UFU, Brasil

Undergraduate Students

Natalie Meinhart, Undergraduate Research Assistant, Summer 2021

Clara Villalon, OUR Connect Undergraduate Research Assistant, Fall 2020-Spring 2021

Laura Garcia, UREP-C Undergraduate Research Visiting Scholar Fall 2019, Incessant Exhibit

Xiang Li, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2019

Kayla Lopez, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2019

Monica Meija, NEXO Program, Undergraduate Research Visiting Scholar Fall 2022, ESRI Storymap

Corissa Meyer, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2019

Rachel King, Anthropology Honors Project, Fall 2018-Spring 2019

Lauren Robbers, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Spring 2019

Kaleigh Karageorge, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2018-Spring 2019

Madelyn Jane VanOostenburg, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2018

Megan Perry, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2017

Kate Yeater, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2016-Spring 2017

Lorena Romero, UREP-CUndergraduate Research Visiting Scholar Fall 2015

Jacki Guenther. MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall-Spring 2014

Rachel Semple, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Spring 2014

Eleanor Grace Platt, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2013

Rachel Marshall, MKWURI Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2012-Spring 2013

Katya Liotta, Anthropology Honors Project, Second Reader Fall 2012-Spring 2013

Alisha Yadav, Anthropology Honors Project Fall 2012-Spring 2013

Alexandra Furman, Undergraduate Research Internship Fall 2011-Spring 2012

Ashley Nicole Ruse, Anthropology Honors Project Spring-Fall 2011