Belén Noroña is a scholar and activist working at the intersection of higher education, grassroots grounded research, and social justice. Belén is currently collaborating with Indigenous and rural women resisting oil extraction in the Amazon of Ecuador. These collaborations are aimed at bridging subaltern and marginalized communities with wider publics interested in engaging with social and epistemic justice frameworks and action. Belén’s research seeks to engage with body-territory and Indigenous and rural epistemologies as educational methodologies to make evident the ways in which situated bodies, Indigenous knowledge, oil infrastructure, and grassroots struggles are embedded in larger hegemonic socio-spatial realities and dynamics.

Belén got her Ph.D. in Human Geography at the University of Oregon, she is a former Fulbright Hays fellow, and a former Mellon Foundation fellow. Please contact Belén at mbnorona@psu.edu.