Consuelo Guayara Sánchez
Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Iowa
Consuelo Guayara Sánchez's received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Iowa in 2007. Her doctoral research focused on how the environment of the Amazon basin has been constructed in the policies and research approaches of different research institutes both in Brazil and Colombia.
Consuelo's research addresses a fundamental factor in the definition of environmental policies and interventions: local politics of knowledge production. At the center of her research is the Amazonian region as a site of knowledge production. In her dissertation, entitled “Governmental Institutions, Research, Place, and Environment,” she specifically examines the role of Amazonian scholars in the process of production, marketing and consumption of the images of the Amazon. The Amazonian region has been differently approached by two separate quasi-governmental research institutions in Brazil and Colombia: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia -INPA (National Amazon Research Institute) in Brazil; and Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas-SINCHI (Scientific Amazonian Research Institute), in Colombia. Consuelo's research brings to the front “local knowledge” as situated practices and representations of lived and worked spaces that certainly vary according to ways of seeing.
As a Visiting Professor, Consuelo is teaching Environment and Development (044:104), an upper level undergraduate course, and The Contemporary Global System (044: 010 S&E), a general education requirement course that is part of the curriculum of social sciences and international studies at the University of Iowa.
Current research interests include examining:
- the structures and labor processes involved in knowledge production about the Amazon and the role they play in the production of specific institutional imaginaries of the Brazilian and Colombian Amazon
- the role of race and ethnicity in the cultural production of environmental imaginaries and broader processes of environmental and cultural change
- the role of geography as a disciplinary choice in the process of knowledge production in the Amazon
Futures plan include extending my ethnographic work to American scholars doing research on the Amazon.
Other information:
Office:
324 Jessup Hall
Mailing Address:
Department of Geography
316 Jessup Hall
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
Phone: (319) 353-2964
Fax: (319) 353-2725
E-mail: consuelo-guayara@uiowa.edu
