October 2025

Juli Hazlewood, intercultural geographer

Intercultural geographer, researcher, and activist Juli Hazlewood, Ph.D., has spent much of the last 30 years in Ecuador, whose forests, rivers, and Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities captured her heart. In 1997, as a UCSC Community Studies undergraduate, she secured a 6-month internship with the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs “eco-development” unit (UTEPA) before “sustainable development” and supervised, program-based internships were a thing. Hazlewood spent a large portion of her six months in the rainforests of the Chocó Biogeographic Region—the Pacific Coast tropical rainforests that extend from Panama to Ecuador, the “other” rainforests that are not the Amazon. Her goal during her internship with UTEPA in 1997 was to learn from Indigenous people themselves—the original “sustainable development” practitioners—about how they cared for the living rainforests around them. Her love for and determination to help protect the Chocó Geographic Region’s teeming, diverse, and critically endangered communities and habitats has motivated her research, teaching, and activism ever since.

In the past decades, Hazlewood has lived, collaborated with, and worked to amplify the voices of the Chachi, Awá, and Afro-descendant peoples of the Ecuadorian Chocó rainforests to defend and protect their ancestral territories and cultures. After earning her PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky in 2010, Hazlewood conducted research and taught at Canadian, Irish, Ecuadorian, and US universities before coming to UCSC in 2017 to teach for both ENVS (courses like “Amazonian Cultures and Conservation”) and RCC (courses like “Hope, Agency, and the Climate Crisis” and “Digital Storytelling for Environmental Justice,” as well as the  Core Course), particularly focusing on decoloniality/self-determination and diverse cultural ways of collaborative care for the Earth. Many of her past students have become leaders in the international and intercultural online youth-led learning community called the “Youth Visioning Collective” (YVC). Since 2020, over 200 young people have learned skills, methodologies, and understandings about the value of collaborating across cultures in support of revindicating the rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant ancestral peoples and economies and worldviews based in reciprocity.