Macarena Gómez Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and academic whose work focuses on decolonial environmental humanities, extractivism, queer Latinx[1] epistemologies, media environments, racial ecologies, and artistic practices.
[2] She was a Fulbright fellow at FLACSO Ecuador's Sociology and Gender Department in Quito and served as Director of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance Studies in 2014.
[3] She co-edits the Dissident Acts series with Diana Taylor at Duke University Press, serves on the GLQ board, and is a collective member of Social Text.
[13] Gómez-Barris held a professorship at Pratt Institute, where she served as the Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and the Director of the Global South, a transdisciplinary hub for experimental research and activist praxis.
[21] She also contributed to the art project Artists-in-Presidents: Transmissions to Power, initiated by Constance Hockaday, which subverts traditional models of political addresses.
In a letter published in Blackwood Gallery, she addressed to Earth, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, Gómez-Barris laments the damage caused by colonialism and capitalism, while urging resistance to ecocide.
[29] She argues that the term "Anthropocene" obscures the colonial origins of the ecological crisis, specifically the role of extractive capitalism in perpetuating environmental harm.