Renata Ruiz Figueroa

Renata joined LAIC as a Ph.D. student in 2020. She holds a Licenciatura (BA) in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her research explores the relations between the human and the non-human in processes of colonization, nation-building, and the expansion of capitalist frontiers in Mexico. Her work examines the tensions between indigenous knowledge and state-driven projects of territorial configuration linked to different notions of nature, politics, and property. She examines these dynamics across historical periods, integrating insights from agrarian history, political ecology, visual studies, ecolinguistics, and historical anthropology.

Renata is also interested in the uses of history, the politics of space/time, the history of rural transformations, biocultural diversity conservation, and the ecology of cloud forests. She is a founding member of the Colectivo Tochinanco, a working group that explores the interconnections between language and the environment to produce didactic materials focused on the revitalization of Nahuatl language and culture. Through this project, she collaborates with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. (IDIEZ) and is a member of the Community-Driven Co-Production Earth Network and the Co-Production of Knowledge Initiative at Columbia’s Climate School and The Center for Science and Society.

As a Teaching Fellow at Columbia, she has taught Spanish at the elementary and intermediate levels, and has designed and taught a section of the course Hispanic Cultures II: Enlightenment Through Present titled "Ecologies of Modernity."