Research and/or Teaching Interests and Expertise

For the last three decades, Dr. Liza Grandia has collaborated as an activist-scholar with Indigenous, environmental, social, and agrarian justice movements in the Maya lowlands of northern Guatemala and Belize.  She is the author of two books about Maya struggles for territorial autonomy and human rights based on seven years of fieldwork. Her third (forthcoming November 2024) book, Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power is a David and Goliath story about how Indigenous movements defied one of the most powerful corporations on the planet and won. As a survivor of cancer, Long Covid, and a campus injury resulting in multiple chemical sensitivity, she brings to her work a passion for environmental health and “canary science.” She is interested in the following: Q'eqchi' Maya; Belize & Guatemala; peasants, and agrarian change; pesticides; toxics in everyday life; corporate trade and globalization; foreign aid and empire; biodiversity conservation; political ecology and environmental justice; the politics of cancer; and theories of the commons.