Timescapes of property: conservation and belonging in the Colombian Pacific Forest Reserve Zone

About the speaker

As a Fulbright grantee and Ph.D. student in Development Studies at Cornell University, Natalia Correa-Sánchez explores how land tenure interacts with forest conservation in Colombia. She is interested in understanding the social, spatial, and political dimensions of how peasant communities negotiate their presence in reserved forested lands amid contestations of what the forest is and who should be entitled to use associated resources.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Natalia pursued her undergraduate studies in law at Universidad de Los Andes, where she also got her master's degree in public policy and sociology. Prior to Cornell, Natalia's work focused on producing high-impact research for public policy decision-making in Colombia, particularly regarding rural land access and administration from different roles, such as academic, public official, consultant, and multilateral organizations. As a public official, Natalia worked for the land authority in Colombia (National Land Agency) and the Constitutional Court. As a consultant, she has supported projects of the World Bank and the International Food and Agriculture Organization in Colombia.

Natalia's work and academic experiences have exposed her to old and new questions about rural dynamics in Colombia, which has inspired her to look for new opportunities to develop high-impact research for decision-making in Colombia and Latin America.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars.