Maria Paz Almenara Unten is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her interdisciplinary work engages frameworks from political theory, media studies, visual culture studies, anti-colonial and feminist STS, and critical indigenous theory. Maria Paz’s dissertation develops a cultural and intellectual history of analog and digital landscape, as a genre for the visual mediation of land, in the context of settler colonialism and extractivism in Latin America. In particular, the project examines the hemispheric transits of environmental and land management policy (and its associated quantified methodologies of enforcement) to illuminate the contradictions and failures of technological transfer across distinct settler colonial contexts and along imperial formations.
Maria Paz holds a BA in Modern Culture and Media (Honors) and Political Science from Brown University. Her previous work engages the photographic archives of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation commission to consider the role of media spectacle in the criminalization and legitimation of violence.