Sylvia Cifuentes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was recently a Visiting Instructor at Pitzer College, where she taught a course on Social Movements in the Global South. Her research and teaching interests are in climate politics, critical indigenous studies and decoloniality, and science and technology studies (STS).

Sylvia’s dissertation research focuses on the ontological and epistemic aspects of multi-scale and multi-ethnic indigenous climate change politics in the Amazon basin. Her engaged research approach integrates a political ecology of scale perspective and indigenous research methods. By putting forward the concept of integral territorial ontologies, she discusses how indigenous politics can challenge the premises of neoliberal climate governance and expand understandings of global climate politics. She further explores how climate change becomes a politically significant object for indigenous organizations and their processes to “scale-up” ancestral knowledges.  

Sylvia’s work broadly interrogates how ethnicity, power and development imaginaries shape climate knowledge and politics. Her research projects have also analyzed indigenous responses to COVID-19 in the Amazon basin; the co-production of land change science and development policies in the Amazon; and traditional ecological knowledge in the Tibetan Plateau, China. She has further collaborated in research projects about environmental science and politics in Chile.

Sylvia is affiliated to the Environmental Justice / Climate Justice Hub of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at UCSB. She is an Editorial Fellow of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and has collaborated with indigenous organizations including the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations in the Amazon basin (COICA). Before joining UCSB, she completed her MSc in Environment and Development at the London School of Economics. She has also worked in environmental and public health projects with the United Nations Development Program, the Peace Corps, Conservation International, among other organizations.