Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Ph.D.

Board Member

Leonardo E Figueroa Helland (PhD) (he/him/le’e/el) is Chair and Associate Professor of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management graduate (MS) at The New School university (Lenapehoking/Manahatta/New York City). He is Associate Director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center where he leads the Indigeneity and Decolonizing Sustainability program. A decolonizing scholar of mestizo (mixed-blood) heritage (Indigenous Mesoamerican and Euro-American), his work underlines the centrality of Indigenous resurgence and revitalization in addressing planetary crises, achieving climate justice and materializing systemic change. He does so by articulating radical Indigenous approaches with other counterhegemonic liberatory perspectives to envision and enact decolonial futures against and beyond imperialist, settler colonial, neocolonial, patriarchal, anthropocentric, capitalist and state-centric orders.  His articles appear, inter alia, in the following journals: the NYU Environmental Law Journal (ELJ); Journal of World Systems Research; Perspectives on Global Development and Technology; Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; Journal of Critical Education and Policy Studies (JCEPS); and UNESCO Journal of Higher Education and Society/Educación Superior y Sociedad (ESS). His chapters appear in the following volumes: Social Movements and World-System Transformation; Inhabiting the Earth: Anarchist Political Ecology for Landscapes of Emancipation; Contesting Extinctions: Critical Relationality, Regenerative Futures; and forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Historical Sociology; as well as in Grassroots Resistances, Alternatives and Solutions to the 21st Century Climate and Global Ecological Crises: Voices from the Global South. He has recently edited two special numbers of Perspectives on Global Development and Technology on the theme of "Earth Crisis and the Global Environmental Movement". His current projects include two books. The first one is titled Indigenous Resurgence and Earth Crisis: Decolonizing Pathways to Liberation and Regeneration (book project under contract at Routledge). The second one entitled The Indigenous Shape of Worlds to Come: Decolonial Futures beyond Resistance (book project to be prospectively published by Daraja Press).