My research focuses on the vitality and agency of rural people and places to understand how rural folk (campesinos) negotiate their insertion into global society and the large scale social and ecological changes of the contemporary period. I am particularly interested to understand the processes that generate, reinforce, and contest inequality, and how those people with the least power create livelihoods that resist their marginalization and adapt to new contexts. My work stretches across three broad processes: agrarian change, wherein peasant and indigenous farmers transition from subsistence oriented to market oriented livelihoods; climate change, which rural communities are already experiencing and demonstrating resilience to; and the continued colonialities of global extraction, in which the resources, cultures, and livelihoods of indigenous and other rural folk are mined for the benefit of others around the globe. Using political ecology and other qualitative methods, my research frequently explores the ways in which these three processes are overlapping and reinforcing. My principal geographical focus is in Latin America, particularly the highland Andes of Bolivia and Ecuador.