Rate My Professor Gabriela Valdivia

Gabriela Valdivia is the Class of 1989 William C. Friday Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and serves as Assistant Dean at Honors Carolina. She is a feminist political ecologist whose work examines the political dimensions of natural resource governance, focusing on how states, firms, and civil society appropriate and transform resources, and how these processes shape cultural and ecological communities. Her research centers primarily on Latin America, particularly Ecuador and Bolivia, where she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork on issues including oil extraction, environmental justice, and socio-environmental inequities. Valdivia grew up in Peru and integrates these experiences into her teaching on Latin American environments and societies as well as advanced courses on political ecology and global environmental justice.

She is the author of the digital storytelling project Crude Entanglements, which explores the affective dimensions of oil production in Ecuador through feminist political ecology. Valdivia is co-author of the book Oil, Revolution, and Indigenous Citizenship in Ecuadorian Amazonia and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography. She maintains affiliations with several UNC centers, including the Center for Galapagos Studies, the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, the Institute for the Environment, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.