Affiliate Associate Professor
Biography
Ph.D., UC Berkeley
B.A., New York University
Megan Ybarra is an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Geography. She is interested in radical placemaking, abolition geographies and environmental justice across Abiayala (also known as the Américas). Her research has included archival research of community records and planning documents, surveys, participant observation and institutional ethnographies to explore the workings of power relations and promise of liberation. She continues to work with current students in the program who are researching abolition, migration, environmental justice and/or Latinx geographies.
Professor Ybarra taught and advised students at the University of Washington for ten years before accepting a position as associate professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Research
Selected Research
- Ybarra, Megan. 2023. "Indigenous to Where? Homelands and nation (pueblo) in Indigenous Latinx studies." Latino Studies 21:22-41.
- “Making Abolition in Geography” Online Forum, Chavez-Norgaard, S, L Montagne, JE Sayers and M Ybarra* (Guest Editors), Society & Space Magazine. https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/making-abolition-in-geography, published October 31, 2022.
- Ybarra, M (2021) Site Fight! Towards the abolition of immigrant detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and everywhere else). Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 53 (1):36-55.
- Heynen, N and M. Ybarra. (2021) “On Abolition Ecologies and Making Freedom as a Place”, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 53(1): 21 – 35.
- Ybarra, M (2019) 'We are not ignorant': Transnational migrants’ experiences of racialized securitization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37: 197-215
- Ybarra, M. (2019) “On becoming a transnational Latinx geographies killjoy.” Society & Space Open Site. http://societyandspace.org/2019/01/23/on-becoming-a-latinx-geographies-killjoy/, published January 23, 2019.
- Lunstrum, E and Ybarra, M (2018) Deploying Difference: Security threat narratives and state displacement from protected aresas. Conservation and Society 16: 114-124
- Ybarra, M.and L. McKinley. (2017) "Hunger Strikes: A Call to End Immigrant Detention." Tacoma, WA: Northwest Detention Center Resistance (NWDCR). Debuted July 23, 2017 at Northwest Film Forum. Available for viewing at: www.hungerstrikershandbook.org
- Ybarra, M (2017) Green Wars: Conservation and decolonization in the Maya Forest. Oakland, CA: University of California Press
- Ybarra, M and Peña, IL (2017) “We Don’t Need Money, We Need to be Together:” Forced transnationality in deportation’s afterlives. Geopolitics (22):34-50.
- Ybarra, Megan. ""You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a": Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility.(Report)." Antipode 45 (2013): 584.
- Ybarra, M, Obando Samos, O, Grandia, L and Schwartz, NB (2012) Tierra, Migración y Vida en Petén, 1999-2009. Guatemala City: CONGCOOP-IDEAR Download PDF
- Ybarra, Megan. "Taming the jungle, saving the Maya Forest: sedimented counterinsurgency practices in contemporary Guatemalan conservation."Journal of Peasant Studies 39, no. 2 (2012): 479-502.
- Ybarra, Megan. "Privatizing the Tzuultaq'a? Private property and spiritual reproduction in post-war Guatemala." Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 4 (2011): 793-810.
- Ybarra, Megan. "Slashed and Burned: The Debate Over Privatization of Q'eqchi' Lands in Northern Guatemala." Society & Natural Resources 24, no. 10 (2011): 1027-041.
Research Advised
- Wolkin, K., & Ybarra, M. (2022). Parallel disentanglement : treaty-based navigation of settler-indigenous governance politics. [University of Washington Libraries].
- Carrasco, W., & Ybarra, M. (2022). The cracking of concrete jungles : practicing indigenous kinship in diaspora. [University of Washington Libraries].
- Orosco, O., & Ybarra, M. (2022). “Se pesa’ : structural uncaring in the COVID-19 pandemic and caregivers” kinships of care. [University of Washington Libraries].
- Sandoval, E., & Ybarra, M. (2021). Landscapes of violence : Latinx migrants navigating life in Chicagoland. [University of Washington Libraries].
- Schwartz, A., & Ybarra, M. (2020). Indigenous nations’ access to geospatial climate change data : the case of the Lummi Nation. [University of Washington Libraries].
- Sandoval, E., & Ybarra, M. (2017). UndocuQueer disidentifications : “being undocumented and gay, just like death, means having to navigate between two worlds.” [University of Washington Libraries].
Courses Taught
Spring 2024
Winter 2023
Autumn 2022
Spring 2022
Winter 2022
Affiliations
Home Department