I examine the political ecology of natural resource governance: how states, firms, and civil society appropriate and transform resources to meet their interests, and how capturing and putting resources to work transforms cultural and ecological communities. I draw on critical resource geography and ethnography to examine environmental governance in Latin America, specifically Ecuador and Bolivia, where economic neoliberalization and volatile socio-political institutions have fueled intense struggles over natural resources.
My most recent project, Crude Entanglements, draws on feminist political ecology and digital storytelling to examine the Ecuadorian oil chain. The project conveys life and oil in two sites of the oil complex in Ecuador: oilfields in the Amazon and oil refining in the city of Esmeraldas.
Email me at valdivia@email.unc.edu if you would like PDFs of my publications, or visit me at ResearchGate or Academia.edu.
Affiliations
Center for Urban and Regional Studies
Institute for the Study of the Americas
Institute for the Arts and Humanities