Graduate Student
Email: sorbara@unc.edu
Phone:
Office: Alumni Hall 403B
Current transformations in the realm of rights are accompanying the volatile post-conflict transition in Colombia, particularly with the recent emergence of the Rights of Nature, of Forests and Rivers. My Ph.D. project broadly asks: Is “the Rights of Nature” a useful paradigm for environmental protection and emancipation? My dissertation will interrogate how the Rights of Nature are made and circulated as discourses and legal provisions, and how they are defended and enforced as state policies, in the Colombian Amazon. The Amazonian basin was declared an “entity subject of rights” in April 2018 in a groundbreaking ruling issued by the Colombian Supreme Court, as a result of the first Latin American climate change lawsuit, advanced by an alliance of Colombian civil society organizations, led by the NGO De Justicia.
How are Amazonian communities in indigenous and peasant territories being affected, and how do they respond to state interventions implemented in the name of the Rights of Nature?
My research dialogues with crucial recent developments and debates in the following subfields: political anthropology, feminist political ecology, and the anthropology of human rights.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Latin America; Amazon; Feminist Political Ecology; Political Anthropology; Human Rights; Social Movements; Human and Non-Human Entanglements; Subjectivities and Identities.