Photo by frank mckenna | Unsplash
Megan Ybarra (she/her) is a geographer whose work engages abolition, environmental justice and Latinx geographies. She is passionate about collaborating across multiple languages and modes of knowledge production, including art, documentaries and zines. She is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, as part of its initiative to foster research in design and social justice for Indigenous, Black and migrant futures.
Professor Ybarra works with students who are researching abolition, migration, environmental justice and/or Latinx geographies. She continues to work with amazing graduate students at UW Geography, where she was a professor from 2014-2024.
Research
My research interests include abolition, environmental justice, and Latinx geographies. My research methods have included archival research of community records and planning documents, community surveys, participant observation and institutional ethnographies to investigate the workings of unequal power relations. I serve on the editorial/advisory boards of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; and The Professional Geographer. I also serve as Chair of the Committee for Annual Honors of the AAG (2023-2024).
Teaching
Human geography challenges us to think about the relationship between people and place. My courses examine racialization as a central principle to how we make our society through where we live, where we work, and where we play. In the US, this means grappling with segregation – not a short history of Jim Crow laws, but a set of practices and policies that are the spatialization of white supremacy in our daily lives. I hope that my classes can be a space where students move from abolition as a hashtag to a set of consensus-based community practices to address harms and keep each other safe.