About

Professor Megan Ybarra works with graduate students who are engaged in research related to abolition geographies, migrations, and environmental justice. She emphasizes mentorship that helps students navigate academia, including seeking funding, publishing their work, and building professional networks. With over twenty years of experience in academia, she supports students on diverse career paths while encouraging MA and PhD students to develop their own dissertation projects through collaborative reading, thinking, and writing. Professor Ybarra values prospective graduate students who have at least two years of relevant experience, such as organizing for climate justice or working with immigrant communities, and who demonstrate the ability to collaborate with the communities where they plan to conduct research, including language proficiencies. Her primary geographic focus for student research includes the US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Ecology
• Philosophy
• Gender studies
• Criminology
• Anthropology
• Political economy
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Radical placemaking is a verb

  Dialogues in Human Geography · 2025-06-09 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How might the practice of radical placemaking make new lifeworlds possible? In this commentary, I respond to Kass and Dunlap's argument that procedural abolitionism bears responsibility for counterinsurgency in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd rebellion. While I appreciate the urgency of critically examining strategies for abolition, I come to different conclusions than the authors’ divide between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous strategies for abolition. Instead, I point to radical placemaking as enacting a solidarity that allows for a prefigurative politics to emerge beyond the boundaries of ideological difference, demonstrating the importance of solidarity in worldmaking.

  PublisherDOI

• Reorienting Knowledge Production Through Storytelling and Collaborative Practice

  The Professional Geographer · 2025-06-12 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Datafication of Environmental Injustice

  Capitalism Nature Socialism · 2025-01-29 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper discusses the contradictory effects of geography and environmental justice research on state administrative processes.Drawing on the siting of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on the Tideflats of Tacoma Washington, we argue that research that fails to consider the limitations of administrative violence becomes complicit in it.Through datafication, scientific research has repeatedly documented the harms of industrial development while taking the violence that made the Tideflats as a given.The Puyallup Tribe and environmental organizations' lawsuit reveal the complicity of science in understanding landscape through a narrow political lens, ignoring the context of settler colonialism and the settler state's responsibility to Indigenous nations.In this way, academic researchers facilitate administrative violence by participating in drawn out regulatory and legal processes while the environmental injustice in question continues.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Latinx geographies

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-12-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Latinx geographies have emerged as a critical field within human geography, challenging historical exclusions and biases within the discipline. Rooted in the Chicano/a studies movement of the 1960s, Latinx geographies offer nuanced understandings of Latinx knowledge, experiences, identities, and struggles within a context of racial oppression and global capitalism. This chapter explores the trajectory of Latinx geographies within human geography, highlighting the contributions of Latinx scholars and examining the intersectionality of Latinx identities with race, gender, and Indigeneity. It traces the emerging scholarship that grapples with anti-Blackness, Indigenous settler appropriations, and language justice. By engaging with topics such as migration, border politics, and place-making, Latinx geographies offer valuable insights into the complexities of Latinx identities and their intersections with broader social and political processes. As the discipline continues to evolve, Latinx geographies provide a vital space for Latinx scholars to reclaim their narratives and challenge dominant discourses within human geography.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Indigenous to where? Homelands and nation (pueblo) in Indigenous Latinx studies

  Latino Studies · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)

  Antipode · 2020 · 55 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as property, then White supremacy maps onto interlocking systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that dispossess people of colour of land and turns their bodies into devalued pollution sinks, where the less‐than‐citizen is forced to live on Tar Pits that they cannot even call “home”. Since 2014, detained immigrants’ activism has fuelled conversations about the punitive nature of administrative immigrant detention, racial profiling, and the city’s responsibility to enforce health, safety and environmental regulations for all residents. Through the stories of detainees, deportees and their co‐conspirators, this site fight illustrates how abolition ecologies call for tearing down toxic detention centres. Beyond rejecting White supremacist logics in immigration enforcement, abolitionists make freedom as a place together.

  PublisherDOI

• On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

  Antipode · 2020 · 187 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.

  PublisherDOI

• Glossary of Terms and Acronyms

  2019-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. Taxing the Kaxlan: Q’eqchi’ Self-Determination within and beyond the Settler State

  2019-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion: Decolonizing the Maya Forest, and Beyond

  2019-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gregorio Casamayor

  4 shared

• Elizabeth Lunstrum

  Boise State University

  3 shared

• Nik Heynen

  1 shared

• Alice B. Kelly

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Isaura L. Peña

  Willamette University

  1 shared

• Lorena Muñoz

  1 shared

Labs

• Megan Ybarra LabPI

Awards & honors

• Green Wars: Conservation and decolonization in the Maya Fore…