I use a political ecology approach to examine 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 focus mainly on Latin America, specifically Ecuador and Bolivia, where economic neoliberalization and volatile socio-political institutions have fueled intense struggles over natural resources.
My digital storytelling project, Crude Entanglements examines the Ecuadorian oil chain using feminist political ecology. The project focuses on life and oil in two sites: oilfields in the Amazon and oil refining in the city of Esmeraldas.
I am the co-author of two books on Ecuadorian Amazonia: Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia (with Flora Lu and Nestor Silva) and Encuentros Intermitentes con los Pueblos Indígenas en Aislamiento Voluntario: Relatos desde el Noroeste del Territorio Waorani [Intermittent Encounters with Peoples in Voluntary Isolation: Accounts from the Waorani Territory] (with Kati Álvarez, Ciara Wirth, and Flora Lu).
I am also the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, a guide to the study of resources that offers a toolkit for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and their worlds.
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