Biography
Isaac Rivera (Chicanx) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington and research associate at the Relational Poverty Network (RPN). His research and teaching interests include digital geographies, political geography, critical cartography & GIS, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, politics of knowledge production, social movements, and environmental justice. Isaac conducts community centered research that draws from a wide range of interdisciplinary frameworks, including anticolonialism and abolition geography in his hometown of Denver, Colorado, to questions that investigate the making of liberatory geographies by the unsheltered community in Seattle, Washington. His dissertation research investigates the entanglement of visual and digital knowledge practices in settler colonialism and how Denver’s Indigenous community refuses otherwise.
He received his BA and MA in Geography from the University of Colorado. He holds additional certificates in Geographic Information Science and Development Studies. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Geography under the advisement of Sarah Elwood (Chair), Megan Ybarra, Victoria Lawson, Jean Dennison, and Anna Hoffman. He is also enrolled in the American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) Graduate Certificate program at the University of Washington.
From 2021-2022 he will be a CLIP Fellow with the Comparative History of Ideas program at the University of Washington.