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Megan Ybarra

Megan Ybarra (she/her/hers) is a human geographer who studies radical placemaking in organizing for environmental justice and abolition. Her research has included archival research of community records and planning documents, surveys, participant observation and institutional ethnography to explore the workings of power relations and promise of liberation. Her book, Green Wars (University of California Press, 2017) / Guerras Verdes (AVANCSO, 2020),  exposed the role of international conservation NGOs in criminalizing Indigenous land defenders and called for land repatriation from Guatemalan protected areas to Q'eqchi' Maya Indigenous peoples. She serves on the editorial boards of The Professional Geographer; Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; and Environment & Planning D: Society & Space.
PhD in Environmental Science, Policy & Management, UC Berkeley
COMM 157: Students examine how people disproportionately impacted by environmental harms mobilize across identities including race and immigration status for environmental justice where they live, work and play. Drawing on social movements, scientific studies and legal cases, we will explore theories and practices of race, nature and climate change.

Books

Guerras Verdes: Conservación y Descolonización en la Selva Maya. Guatemala City: Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala (AVANCSO). 2020. Revised translation of Green Wars; with prologue by Gladys Tzul Tzul and epilogue by Jennifer J. Casolo. Open Access via the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales

Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest. Oakland: University of California Press. 2017.

Articles

Ybarra, M (2023) “Indigenous to Where? Centering homelands (pueblo) in Indigenous/Latinx studies.” Latino Studies 21: 22 – 41.

S Chavez-Norgaard, L, Montagne, JE Sayers and M Ybarra (2022) “Introduction: Making abolition through one million experiments.” https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/making-abolition-in-geography

N Morgan, C Serrano, C Samuels, SA Smythe and M Ybarra (2022) “Reflections on Cops Off Campus and Everywhere Else Movements, from 2020 and beyond.” https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/cops-off-campus-and-everywhere-else-a-conversation

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.

Muñoz, L. and Ybarra, M* (2019) “Introduction: Latinx Geographies.” Society & Space Magazine. https://www.societyandspace.org/forums/latinx-geographies 

Ybarra, M (2019) “We are not ignorant:” Transnational migrants’ experiences of racialized securitization.” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 37(2): 197-215.

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, M (2012) “Taming the Jungle, Saving the Maya Forest: Sedimented counterinsurgency practices in Guatemalan conservation.” Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 479-502.