Mariana Reyes

Profile

Research interests

The Anthropocene, science and art museums, environmental activism, climate justice, Black and Indigenous geographies, decolonial theory.

PhD project

Decolonising futures: representations of the Anthropocene in the contemporary museum space

I combine feminist, critical race and decolonial discourse, and museum studies in order to examine the role of museums in curating Anthropocene imaginaries. My project’s primary objective is to analyse how museums and public art act as agents that promote understandings of ‘a new age of humans.’ In this respect, I critically review how museums’ philosophies and practices inform their roles in communicating scientific knowledge; and how this in turn shapes the personal positions and political engagement of their public audiences.

Supervisors

• Kathryn Yusoff, School of Geography, QMUL
• Kerry Holden, School of Geography, QMUL

Academic background

• BS Biology – Universidad de Guadalajara
• MSc Environment, Culture and Society - University of Edinburgh

Funding

• Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT)

Conference papers

• ‘Contested performances of climate action: the case of the Museum of Tomorrow in Brazil’ Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, 2021.
• ‘About collectable figures: destabilising colonial views at London’s Crystal Palace’ with Jorge Lucero and Jazmin Ruiz. Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, 2021.
• ´Decolonial Anthropocene: communicating the environmental crisis from the Global South´. Conference Alterities: intervention and ecologies of care in changing worlds. Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, 2020.
• ‘The post-human museum: curating the Anthropocene’ Conference Art in the Anthropocene. Trinity College Dublin, 2019.
• ‘Communicating the science of a new epoch: representations of the Anthropocene in the contemporary museum space’ XVII Symposium of Mexican students and studies in the UK, University of Cambridge, 2019.
• ‘Exhibiting the Anthropocene: decolonizing futures in the contemporary museum space’ Postgraduates in Latin American Studies Annual Conference. University of York, 2019.

Publications

Academic

• The end of worlding: indigenous cosmologies in the Anthropocene, in Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene, edited by Earl T. Harper and Doug Specht. Routledge’s Environmental Humanities Series, 2021.
• Racial geographies of the Anthropocene: memory and erasure in Rio de Janeiro. Politics, 2021. Special Issue on Race and Climate Change.
• El discurso del Antropoceno: limitaciones ante la emergencia climática, in Una revisión crítica del Reporte Especial del 1.5°C del Panel Intergubernamental de Cambio Climático: Explorando otras visiones y alternativas hacia una sociedad baja en emisiones. Fundación Heinrich Böll. 2019.
• Descolonizando el saber: la experiencia de la Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca, México, in Jandiekua, Revista mexicana de educación ambiental. No. 2. 2015.

Non-academic

• Interwoven Voices of the Anthropocene: Multispecies Stories in the Contemporary Museum Space. The Activist History Review. April 2020.
• Blog entry ‘Museum ethnographies in Rio de Janeiro’. Society for Latin American Studies blog. January 2020.
• Zapatistas embark on Journey for life. Latin America Bureau. October 2021.

Book reviews

• Creating the beyond and the otherwise: intellectual exchanges between Blackness and Indigeneity. Review of the book Otherwise worlds: against settler colonialism and anti-blackness, by Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro and Andrea Smith (eds.) (2020). Durham and London, Duke University Press, 400 pp. in Cultural Studies. November, 2020.
• Down to Earth: politics in the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour (2018). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 140 pp., inRevista de Investigación en Geografía.  2. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. December, 2019.

Professional memberships

• Society of Latin American Studies – Member
• Conference of Latin American Geography – Member
• Latin American Studies Association – Member
• Museums Association – Member

Research