Laura is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Development Studies from McGill University and a Master’s in Development Studies from York University. She also holds graduate diplomas from the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).
Laura’s research interests include indigenous movements in Latin America, human rights, development studies and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Her doctoral dissertation “Making Law, Making Worlds: a Pluriversal Study of Indigenous Socio-Legal Resistance to the Mayan Train in Mexico” is supervised by Prof. Cristina Rojas and Prof. Laura Macdonald. It adopts a critical approach rooted in pluriversal theory to illuminate ways in which Mayan people and organizations navigate international, regional and national human rights instruments to contest the representation of their territories as a lifeless asset.
Aside from her academic work, Laura has been working with human rights and civil society organizations since 2015. Since 2019, she has been the coordinator of the transnational advocacy group Pueblos Étnicos y Paz – Red Global/Ethnic Peoples and Peace – Global Network, a group of academics and activists dedicated to advancing the implementation of the 2016 Colombian Peace Accords in indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories through global collaborative advocacy strategies.
Laura is the recipient of the Carl Jacobsen Peace Prize (2022), the Word Warrior Society Bursary Award (2023), the Kanta Marwah Research Grant (2023) and the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) graduate essay prize (2023).