Graduate Student Directory
- Title
- Ph.D. Candidate
- Division Social Sciences Division
- Department
- Latin American & Latino Studies
- Affiliations Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
- Website
- Office Location
- Crown College Faculty Wing, 217
- Mail Stop Merrill/Crown Faculty Services
- Mailing Address
- 95064
Research Interests
Climate and Environmental Justice, extractivism, comparative politics, feminist political ecology, decolonial theory and practice
Biography, Education and Training
Alejandra Watanabe Farro is an international Ph.D. student in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a BA in Communications and a MA in Environment, Development, and Policy from the University of Sussex (UK). She is an environmental and climate justice activist, whose professional background has been primarily in conservation in Peru. Alejandra has worked as a social communicator in different environmental organizations in the design, development, and execution of communication strategies for environmental policy change. Using a decolonial approach, nested in the feminist political ecology field, her research interests explore the politics of environmental policymaking by examining the processes of participation and consensus-building, while paying particular attention to the historical power dynamics embedded in the policy-making process itself. Alejandra is currently a graduate research assistant at the Human Rights Investigations Lab, leading undergraduate students in open source investigations to discover and verify human rights violations in the Americas. She is the co-coordinator of the Extractivism and Society Research Cluster at UCSC.