Joel E. Correia

About

Joel E. Correia is the principal investigator and director of the FRONTERAS Collective at Colorado State University. He is a critical human-environment geographer with over 20 years of applied research and collaboration experience across the Américas. Correia works at the intersection of political ecology and development geographies to advance transformative research on social-ecological challenges related to climate change adaptation, social inequality, and conservation, particularly in the Gran Chaco and Amazon forests. His work is rooted in political ecology, critical development studies, and conservation social science approaches, employing diverse methods such as ethnography, legal analysis, ecological assessment, geospatial analysis, visual media, and participatory methods. Correia's research focuses on understanding and promoting just social-ecological futures through pathways that emphasize territorial care, reciprocity, and self-determination, working closely with Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, human rights advocates, and scientists on the front lines of social-ecological change.

Research topics

• Political science
• Sociology
• Geography
• Environmental ethics
• History

Selected publications

• Between Flood and Drought: Environmental Racism, Settler Waterscapes, and Indigenous Water Justice in South America’s Chaco

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2022-04-11 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article advances a novel approach to investigating geographies of settler colonialism and environmental justice through a critical physical geography (CPG) of water scarcity in the South American Chaco. Drawing from multimethod research conducted in collaboration with Enxet and Sanapaná communities in Paraguay, I evaluate how waterscape change produces social vulnerability with a focus on Indigenous access to safe drinking water. Stemming from a seemingly simple question—how have annual flo…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A political ecology of jurisdictional REDD+: investigating social-environmentalism, climate change mitigation, and environmental (in)justice in the Brazilian Amazon

  Journal of Political Ecology · 2022-01-31 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  This article contributes to political ecologies of forest-based climate change mitigation strategies by assessing Brazil's first sub-national jurisdictional REDD+ program. Proponents of jurisdictional REDD+ argue that the approach brings more social and environmental benefits than small-scale REDD+ projects and addresses negative socio-economic impacts of deforestation pressures on forest-dependent communities. Our analysis tells a different story. We assess Acre's sub-national jurisdictional (S…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• All the land was stolen: investigating the aporia of justice through countertopographies of Indigenous land rights and settler colonialism across the Americas

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2021-04-23 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter evaluates the limits of justice in settler colonial contexts across the Americas. I begin by reviewing legal geography scholarship, arguing for a closer engagement with critical environmental justice studies and attention to settler colonialism. What follows is a countertopographic legal geography analysis, that shows how extractive imperatives and settler legal frameworks in the U.S. and Paraguay shape Indigenous struggles for land restitution, running up against the aporia the law…

  PublisherDOI

• Ruptures and Continuities

  2023-06-02 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Latin America’s resource frontiers have long been the site of land (re)valuations driven by different forms of speculative finance that support extractive industries and international interests over those of local peoples. Drawing from an analysis of agrarian extractivism and Indigenous labor in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands, the chapter shows that contemporary land grabbing builds from sedimented histories of routinized, racial dispossession—the continuities of colonial capitalism. Histories…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Demo-Cartographic Imaginaries: Dilemmas of Data, Erasure, and the Threat of Latent Authoritarianism to Indigenous Land Rights in Paraguay

  Latin American Perspectives · 2025-03-18 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article assesses the state of Indigenous rights in Paraguay through the year 2022 to show how latent authoritarianism and agrarian oligarchies threaten to roll back ongoing efforts to support the country's democratic transition. Recent civil society efforts to map Indigenous lands and make georeferenced data about those lands free to access online presuppose that greater transparency about the location and extent of titled and claimed lands will protect communities from dispossession and vi…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael S. Esbach

  Colorado State University

  6 shared

• Flora Lu

  3 shared

• Gabriela Valdivia

  3 shared

• Joe Bryan

  University of Colorado Boulder

  2 shared

• Penelope Anthias

  2 shared

• Cheryl McEwan

  2 shared

• Jorge Ruiz Ruiz

  Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados

  1 shared

• Jim Biles

  1 shared

Similar researchers at University of Florida

• Dr. Cynthia S. Simmonsh-19
• Dr. David Keellingsh-15
• Dr. Nirav Patelh-10