Joel E. Correia

Joel E. Correia is a human-environment geographer whose research and teaching focus on geographies of justice by investigating intersections of human rights, development, and environmental change with attention to Indigenous politics in Latin America. Much of that work examines dynamics of large-scale infrastructure development, expanding extractive frontiers, deforestation, Indigenous rights, territorialities, and social movements.

His current and recent field-based research projects are based in the Gran Chaco (Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina) and the Ecuadorian Amazon. Correia is currently working on projects related to Indigenous territorial management and land rights, the implementation of Inter-American Court of Human Rights decisions, legacies of settler colonialism, expanding agrarian frontiers, political ecologies of infrastructure, and relationships between biocultural diversity, climate change mitigation, and just conservation policy.

Joel’s research is widely published in leading geography and interdisciplinary journals that include Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Peasant Studies, Geoforum, Journal of Political Ecology, and Journal of Latin American Geography. He has also contributed chapters to edited volumes from Routledge, Edward Elgar, among others. Correia’s first book, Disrupting the patrón: Indigenous land rights and the fight for environmental justice in Paraguay, will be published by University of California Press in May 2023. In addition to academic publishing, he is committed to public scholarship and regularly contributes to The Conversation and has been interviewed for works on Indigenous human rights and environmental change by NBC Latino, Mongabay, World Politics Review, among others.

After receiving my Ph.D. in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder in August 2017, Correia completed a Postdoctoral position at the University of Arizona (2017-18). He holds an MA in Latin American Studies from University of Arizona, a BA in Geography from Humboldt State University, and an AA from College of the Redwoods.