Prior to coming to the University of Washington, Megan Ybarra spent four years as Assistant Professor of Politics and contributing faculty member in Latin American Studies and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University. For Ybarra, her passion for research was sparked by a footnote.
“I took a world history class my senior year of high school that waxed poetic about the importance of the French Revolution for the world, but then only acknowledged the slaves who freed themselves and created a new nation (Haiti) in a short footnote,” she said.
In her first year at New York University, she was awarded research funding to conduct archival research in Haiti and New Orleans to look at the role of the slave revolution in forging a Creole identity. After earning a degree in Latin American Studies, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala for two years.
“My experience there left me with urgent questions about social justice in conservation, particularly for indigenous peoples in the Maya Forest. I sought to answer those questions, and work with people who are actively finding solutions as the research project for my PhD in Environmental Studies at UC Berkeley,” she said.
Ybarra will be teaching an introductory class on geographies of environmental justice and an advanced undergraduate course on race, nature and power. She will also begin developing a new research project that explores identity formations and social justice in transnational migrations, particularly for Central Americans with family networks that extend into Mexico and the United States.
Her research has taken her all over the world, including to Guatemala, where she traveled to the Maya Forest to learn about a family’s life after the civil war, their relationship to the “nation-state and protected areas, and the claims they are making for territorial autonomy as indigenous peoples,” she said.
She’s published several articles on this research and is revising a book with the tentative title, Green Wars: Conservation, Remilitarization and Activism in Guatemala’s Maya Forest.