Members

J. Alejandro Artiga-Purcell

J. Alejandro Artiga-Purcell is an Assistant Professor at San Jose State University. He received a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies & Psychology from Bowdoin College, and a M.A. in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Rooted in Political Ecology and Environmental Justice, Alejandro’s interdisciplinary interests, research and advocacy-work address the uneven and multi-faceted power relations that simultaneously drive environmental degradation and spark social resistance and solidarity movements that make sustainable futures possible. For the past decade, his research and advocacy have focused on water justice, extractive development and socio-environmental conflict in Central America. Specifically, he has worked with communities and environmental NGOs to understand gold mining’s threat to water, livelihoods and national sovereignty in El Salvador. His current research examines how El Salvador became the first and only nation in the world to ban metal mining, and how this unprecedented victory for environmental justice informs ongoing water conflicts and environmental movements throughout Latin America and beyond.

In addition to his experience in El Salvador, Alejandro has worked with a variety of Non-governmental organizations in Honduras, Chile, Washington DC and California, on issues spanning transborder mining, US trade policy, water governance, Central American immigration, and lithium extraction. He has helped organize a number of international forums that bring together diverse activists, researchers, and indigenous and community leaders to examine the limits and potential alternatives to highly polluting and socially disruptive extractive development. He firmly believes in and works for participatory research, education and praxis aimed at promoting social and environmental justice that embraces diversity and coalition-building with underrepresented and vulnerable populations. These beliefs and commitments animate Alejandro’s pedagogical approach. He has taught courses on Political Ecology and Environmental Justice at UCSC and UCLA. 

Jéssica Malinalli Coyotecatl-Contreras

Jéssica is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (2025-2027) in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (UCSB, 2025) and a Master’s in Social Anthropology (El Colegio de Michoacán, 2013).

Her work builds on the knowledge of women and Indigenous communities to study the intersection of the (built) environment, political economy, and violence in the Americas. Through archival, ethnographic, and legal sources, Jéssica developed a multiscalar perspective on infrastructure in collaborations with frontline organizers. In her work, she combines and expands on the insights from feminist political ecology, anticolonial science and technology studies, and anti-extractivism.

Jéssica pursues two main lines of investigation: Energy Transition Justice and Feminist Futures. In the former, she engages with the struggles of peasant and Indigenous peoples in Central Mexico fighting against the imposition of transitional megaprojects, as well as the abandonment of oil and gas in California. In the latter, Jéssica centers the experiences of women building alternatives in the present that illuminate infrastructures of care and the commons.  Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed articles in Ecología Política: Cuadernos de Debate Internacional (2016), Ciudades: Análisis de la coyuntura teoría e historia urbana (2018), Regions and Cohesion (2021), as well as online pieces for broader audiences. She is currently working on my first manuscript “Sovereign and Deadly Energy Transition: Communal Life Against Extractivism in Mexico.” 

Akshay Dua

Akshay Dua is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received a BA in Political Science and History from the University of Toronto. His research centers on the relationship between regional political economies and governance structures, particularly the ways in which alternative forms of governance outside the state are informed by the creation of extractive enclaves. This research agenda lies at the intersection of comparative political economy, social movement studies, and political ecology, with a focus on Latin America and South Asia. Presently, Akshay is investigating the unique manner in which land is commodified and marketed across different parts of the world, while engaging in local labour organizing.

Nate Edenhofer

Nate Edenhofer is a PhD candidate in the Politics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on conflict and the political economy of extractivism in Latin America, especially Central America.

Nate’s dissertation focuses on how anti-mining struggles waged by ordinary people over 25 years in Guatemala and Honduras forced the stagnation of the metal-mining industry in each country, despite hostile political conditions and the opposition of powerful transnational companies. In the process race, gender, and democracy became central terrains of struggle, their meanings being contested and reshaped from above and below. Answering how these movements put extractivism on the defensive provides empirical and theoretical lessons on power and organization in social movements, the political vulnerabilities of mining capital, the contradictions of the capitalist state, and the strategies that elites take to try to dissolve opposition, including when they backfire. 

Nate has published both peer-reviewed work and public reports on the politics of extractivism, inclusive development, and policing and inequality. He has a decade of experience organizing around labor, housing, and immigration issues. 

Thomas Chiasson-LeBel

Thomas Chiasson-LeBel is an Assistant Professor at the Université de l’Ontario Français. His cross-disciplinary research combines political economy, political sociology, and comparative politics to deepen our conceptualization of how different economic and social actors influence development policies and their outcomes in resource-rich countries of the Americas (Bolivia, Canada, Ecuador, Venezuela). He is collaboratively developing a framework inspired by critical cultural political economy to better explain who the victors are in semiotic battles that oppose conglomerates seeking licences for their activities, particularly in the extractive sector—and local communities prioritizing other uses of the territory they inhabit. Thomas has published several articles and book chapters and has coordinated various journal special editions comparing the influence of social movements and economic elites in different countries led by post-neoliberal governments. His research has previously received support from Canadian and Latin American funding sources, including the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He teaches courses on topics such as Sustainable Development and Socio-Ecological Transition, Global Political Economy, Canadian Political Economy, and Corporate Social Responsibility. In the countries where he works, Thomas maintains strong ties with social movements and community-based organisations to ensure his research contributes to specific struggles for greater equality, a healthier planet, and collective emancipation.

Lorena de la Puente

Lorena is a Peruvian sociologist and Latin-Americanist with expertise in mining governance, particularly mining conflicts, participatory governance, and gender-differentiated impacts in Peru and the Andean Region. Today, her research focuses on lithium extraction, comparing the cases of Imperial County (California) and Puno (Peru) to inform mining policies for a fair and inclusive energy transition.

Before starting her Ph.D. at IoES, Lorena worked as a Latin American officer for the Natural Resource Governance Institute (2017-2020), and as a part-time professor of Social Science at Universidad del Pacífico (2017-2020). She obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Social Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2013) and her Master’s at Oxford University’s Latin American Centre (2016).

Lorena’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) – Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship (2024-2025), the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation Dissertation Fellowship (2024-2025), UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship (2026) and she is a member of the Resources for the Future’ Critical Minerals Research Lab (2025-2026). During her time at IoES Lorena has worked as a Climate and Community Project Research Fellow (2023-2024), and was a Fulbright Grantee (2020-2022).

Fernando Leiva

Fernando Leiva is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UCSC. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1998). 

He is the author of numerous essays that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as New Political Economy, Latin American Politics and Society, Latin American Perspectives and the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Two landmark books are Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile (SUNY Press, 2021). 

For the last decade, his research deploys a Critical Cultural Political Economy Perspective that examines how semiotic and material practices co-constitute reality. He uses this approach to examine newly emerging strategies with which transnational capital aims to expand the frontiers of extractivism and craft the foundations for a new capitalist hegemonic project anchored on “eco-extractivism.”

His current research follows three main lines: A book, tentatively titled, Mythmaking Eco-Extractivism: Materio-Semiotic Foundations of its Imaginaries and Political Technologies; a textbook, Decarbonization by Dispossession: A Critical Introduction. More recently, he started a research project on the finance-extractivism- climate-change-energy transition nexus focused on Chile, his country of origin.

Tamara Ortega-Uribe

Tamara Ortega-Uribe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With a background in Sociology and a Master’s in History from the University of Chile, she has built her academic career as a university professor and researcher in Chile. She has conducted research in various areas, including social participation in decision-making processes, environmental policies, criminalization of poverty, and social movements for political change. Her experience extends to serving as a consultant in governmental agencies and coordinating social projects with non-governmental organizations, community leaders, and social activists in Chile.

Tamara’s research and scholarly pursuits have received support from prestigious institutions, such as the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, Fulbright Education USA, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (SYLFF), the Tinker Foundation, and the American Political Science Association, among others. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of international political economy and critical social theory, focusing on contemporary debates surrounding green transition narratives, green capitalism, industrial policies, and neo-colonial processes associated with lithium extraction in the Americas. She is an active member of the Extractivism & Society Research Cluster at UCSC and a permanent member of various social and political organizations. 

Alejandra Watanabe Farro

Received her Ph.D in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alejandra’s research interests bridge interdisciplinary fields, including cultural political economy, political ecology, and critical communications studies, with a focus on environmental and climate justice, socio-ecological distribution conflicts, and resource governance. Her research has taken various forms throughout her professional and academic career but generally engages with the question of how hegemonic discourses on environment and development shape the production of space and subjectivities. Her work focuses on the political economy of climate, emphasizing the examination of institutions and power structures that perpetuate historical inequalities affecting rural territories in Latin America, specifically in the Andean region. Informed by a decolonial approach to the study of postcolonial nations in Latin America, she explores the meaning-making processes that create territories of extraction and appropriation, as well as the role of race (particularly whiteness) in the transnational accumulation of capital.She was part of the founding cohort of graduate students in the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UCSC, where she led undergraduate students in open-source investigations to uncover and verify human rights violations in the Americas. She is also a co-founder and member of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at UCSC. Her research has been supported by the President’s Dissertation-Year Fellowship at UCSC, the P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship, and the Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, and is part of the Chevening alumni network.

Tomas Ocampo (former member)

Tomas Ocampo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and in Public Policy, and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of California, Riverside. His primary research interests include social and environmental movements in the US and Latin America, with a particular focus on environmental justice. He has examined how environmental justice activists and non-governmental organizations engage with the state of California and local governments, part of an assessment of the impact of 10 years of environmental justice legislation in California. He is currently examining environmental and climate j local government agencies. He is a recipient justice movements across Latin America and their strategies of engagement with the state and subnational governments. These issues are connected to his broader interests in how groups affected by natural resource extraction & pollution develop political consciousness and the mechanisms they utilize to enact social change across the world. Tomas has previously worked on environment, sustainability, and transportation issues in of the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship of the University of California, and was selected for the American Political Science Association’s Diversity Fellowship Program for Spring 2022.