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headshot of George Ygarza

George Ygarza

Postdoctoral Fellow

Sociology
LT 406

Background

George Ygarza is a first-generation popular educator, militant researcher and scholar with a PhD in Global Studies. 

Ygarza's research originates from two points of inflection. From the bottom up, he engages in collaborative research with place-based movements for self-determination and the reproduction of life, particularly in Indigenous and urban spaces. Within this paradigm, Ygarza has recently helped develop and co-theorize municipalist projects in the U.S. 

His other orientation is positioned within the study of postcolonial race and meaning-making in state formation, where he works on examining the ways in which states create subjectivity and territoriality as forms of biopower. He began this work during his graduate studies, in which he examined the ways that extractivism enables the racialization and simultaneous dispossession of populations. 

Ygarza held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-2024) as part of the team that worked on project, set to go live in the winter of 2024. Moreover, George works as an interlocutor and translator for Latin American critical thought; his latest project with Raul Zibechi, titled , was recently published by AK Press. Ygarza is a frequent contributor to , as well as a contributor to ROAR and Truthout, among other publications.

Select Publications

  • “Decolonizing Global Studies” in The Linda Tuhiwai Smith Reader. Forthcoming
  • “Building Power from Below: Dispatches and Lessons from Movement Building” Critical Social Policy (2024).
  • Latin America and Palestine. NACLA Report Vol.56.4, Editor, Winter 2024.
  • Building Power in Place: A Municipalist Organizing Toolkit. Editor. July 2024
  • Other Worlds and Societies in Movement: Debating Anti-Colonialism and Transition in Latin America. [Translation] AK Press, April 2024.


Education

  • Global Studies, PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • International Relations, M.A. Brooklyn College, City University of New York
  • Political Science, B.A., Rutgers University

Research Interests

  • Latin American state formation
  • Race-making
  • Place-based and informed resistance
  • Otherwise politics
  • Abolition

Teaching Interests

  • Analyzing state power
  • Popular power and power from below
  • Abolition
  • Place-based politics

Awards

  • Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity Development Grant. Claremont Colleges, 2023
  • Early Career Researcher Paper Prize, Runner-up. Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working Group. British International Studies Association, 2023
  • Sixteenth Global Studies Conference Emerging Scholar Award, 2023