Gender & Women’s Studies | Curating the Past, Weaving the Future: Decolonial Feminist Politics of Time and Memory

Lara Lookabaugh is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). She is an interdisciplinary feminist geographer whose research engages decolonial and Indigenous geographies, feminist political geography, critical development studies, and geographies of memory in Latin America and the Southern United States. Her dissertation is the result of a 6-year participatory research collaboration with a Mam Maya women’s collective in Guatemala that explores how the everyday political and artistic practices of Indigenous women create space to envision and enact alternative futures. Through an overarching decolonial feminist geographic lens, she weaves together the knowledge that informs the work of the collective, theory produced by Indigenous scholars from throughout the Americas, temporal geographies, scholarship that interrogates the endurance of colonial legacies across space and time, and her lived experience as a librarian, artist, and organizer. A second strand of her research investigates the temporal politics of archives and libraries. Lara is a founding member of two editorial and writing collectives, Desirable Futures and Against Colonial Grounds, that bring together scholars to explore colonial constructions of time and futurity and the intersections of Black and Indigenous Geographies.

This event is a Job Talk for a faculty position in Gender & Women’s Studies.