George Ygarza

George Ygarza is a first-generation scholar, popular educator and organic researcher. He completed his Ph.D. in Global Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in politics and culture. For his dissertation research, George spent several months working with communities resisting mining and the expansion of extractive zones in the southern Andes. George’s original research questions drew from his training in political science, seeking to understand how the political domain could be amplified to include the concerns and issues of campesino and Indigenous people. Initially setting out to investigate contemporary anti-mining resistance in Espinar, Peru, George’s dissertation ultimately ended up being a critical counter-reading of the Peruvian state. At this point he inverted his subject of study, moving away from examining the struggles of residents in this southern Peruvian rural mining town in the department of Cusco, to interrogating the state and the terms and conditions of its polity. George’s latest work returns to understanding the politics of refusal against mining in Espinar and beyond. George brings the fields of politics, cultural anthropology, and sociology together for a transdisciplinary study of the political modes of being. As such, George's broader research is situated at the confluence of critical frameworks and hemispheric hermeneutics within Black and Native studies, as well Cultural Studies, Latin American Studies, and Critical Global Studies. In his latest project as a critical interlocutor in the Americas, George completed the English Translation of Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America, a book by collaborator and journalist Raul Zibechi.