Juli Hazlewood is in the process of completing her 2nd year of the UK Geography Ph.D. program.  Her research is dedicated to examining political ecologies and working with place-based peoples of the Americas, namely indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, on collaborative projects of decolonizing knowledge. She has been conducting research in Esmeraldas (northwest coastal province), Ecuador since 1997.

Her dissertation research examines  Chachi, Awa, and Afro-Ecuadorian peoples' responses to expanded African palm oil plantations in their home, San Lorenzo, Ecuador: Although the Ecuadorian Choco study site is designated as one of the top ten biodiversity hotspots by the World Bank and the World Wildlife Foundation, as of 2000, only 6% of this rainforest remained. Since the completion of the Ibarra-San Lorenzo highway in 1997, African oil palm plantations have replaced 89,000 acres of forest. Future plans include the tripling of palm oil acreages in attempt to meet global demands for carbon trading, agrofuels, and transfat alternatives. Afro-Ecuadorian and Indigenous peoples are responding by emphasizing rights to food sovereignty and to cultural ways of knowing. These assertions shape modes of popular struggle and geographies of hope, making reference to existing knowledge about the land to make sense of chaotic transformations. Hope is defined as recognition of possibility within novel socio-economic relationships with the land, each other, and the world.  In sum, Juli's research posits that the place-based peoples of San Lorenzo are not pawns to neoliberal logic; instead they are architects of diverse geographies of hope in extensive palm oil plantation landscapes.

Advisor: Sue Roberts. Committee: Tad Mutersbaugh, Morgan Robertson, Patricia Ehrkamp, and Lisa Cliggett (Anthropology).