Alexandra Lamiña

Director of Indigenous Geographies Lab, Assistant Professor

Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies

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Education

Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin (2024)

Areas of Specialty

• Indigenous Geographies and Cartographies
• Gender and Women Studies
• Community and Indigenous Planning
• Latin American Studies and Amazonian Geographies

Alexandra Lamiña <www.alexandralamina.com> is a Kitu-Kara Indigenous woman from Nayón, Quito-Ecuador, and a first-generation PhD professor working on community-based initiatives to better understand Indigenous geographies and Indigenous planning practices in Latin America. Thanks to her advocacy and academic and professional training in geography, environmental studies, and urban planning, she has successfully established horizontal and long-term working relationships with various Indigenous organizations and individuals in Ecuador’s Central Amazonia since 2009. Currently, Alexandra is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography with joint appointments in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

Selected Publications

Lamiña, A. (forthcoming). Book chapter: Transgressing settler-colonial urban epistemologies through Southern Indigenous planning. The Routledge Handbook of Southern Urbanism(s), 2025. Ed. Catalina Ortiz and Chandrima Mukhopadhyay.

Grefa, G. & Lamiña, A. (forthcoming). Book chapter: Killakina: Decolonizing Planning for Rematriating Land and Life in Decolonizing Planning: Power and Knowledge in the Informal City, 2025, Ed. Bjørn Sletto, Tanja Winkler and Efadul Huq.

Lamiña, A. (2024). “Are we being the actors in mapping or being the subjects mapped?” community-engaged research in Amazonian Indigenous geographies. In Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research. SAGE Publications, Ltd., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529683394

Lamiña, A. & Sletto, B. (2024). Settler urbanism, emotional geographies, and Indigenous planning in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 42(3), 380-400. https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758241240872

Sletto, B., Lamiña, A. M., Rakes, K., & Stycos, M. (2022). Intersectionality, gender, and project-induced displacement in the informal city: The struggle over stormwater development in Los Platanitos, Dominican Republic. World Development, 158, 105972. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105972

Vitery, A., & Lamiña, A. (2020). The Ethnocartography of Sumak Allpa: The Kichwa Indigenous Community of Pastaza, Ecuador. In B. Sletto, J. Bryan, A. Wagner, & C. Hale (Eds.), “Radical Cartographies: Participatory Mapmaking from Latin America,” the University of Texas Press, pp. 97–113.

Sletto, B., Barrera de la Torre, G., Lamiña, A. M., & Pereira Júnior, D. (2021). Walking, knowing, and the limits of the map: performing participatory cartographies in Indigenous landscapes. Cultural Geographies, 28(4), 611–627. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211034479