Maria Angelica Prada Uribe
CV | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
environmental law and climate change, feminism and gender studies, peasant studies, development and international investment law, social movements, spatial theory, law and anthropology
Research Area(s)
Latin America
Profile
Maria Angelica Prada-Uribe is an Alexander von Humboldt Climate Protection Fellow working in the Environmental Rights in a Cultural Context Project at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Department of Law & Anthropology). She holds a Bachelor of Laws Degree from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), where she also obtained a Master’s in International Law and a Master’s in Anthropology. She has researched numerous topics on international law, ranging from the use of indicators as a mechanism of global governance in her International Law Master’s thesis to the relationship between constitutional law, international human rights law, and investment arbitration. As part of this latter research, which was conducted as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, she was part of a team that presented an amicus curiae before the Colombian Constitutional Court arguing that some clauses of the bilateral investment treaty between Colombia and France were unconstitutional. In her own country she has taught introduction to law, public international law, international economic law and research methods at Universidad del Rosario, Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Católica de Colombia.
More recently, Maria Angelica has worked on several interdisciplinary research projects that explore the relationship between law, anthropology, and geography. Together with a geography professor at Universidad de los Andes, she has conducted participatory-action-research with peasant communities living in protected areas in Colombia studying how GIS can be strategically deployed by them to resist or negotiate their living conditions with the environmental agencies. As part of her Anthropology Master thesis, she conducted an activist ethnography with a popular environmental social movement in Bogota, Colombia, in which she explored how the day to day practices, the contradictions, and the internal disputes within the organizations became an inherent part of their spatial and class politics, which this movement mobilizes to defend the territory of the Eastern Hills, maintain a collective identity and build alliances.