When Dr. Claudia Diaz-Diaz joined the Faculty of Education in the fall of 2025, she brought with her a research program shaped by more than two decades of work alongside community educators and women’s grassroots organizations in Chile. Blending decolonial, feminist, and community-engaged perspectives, she asks how education can help communities respond to social and ecological challenges with resilience and collective agency. Dr. Diaz-Diaz’s academic path includes faculty and educational leadership roles at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia, where she contributed to Indigenous initiatives and taught across multiple programs. Central to her work is a commitment to community-based learning and participatory research—approaches she first developed while supporting adult education initiatives in Valparaíso, Chile. These early collaborations continue to inform her inquiries about how colonial legacies shape educational systems and how local knowledge and land relationships can guide more just and sustainable futures.
Her current research focuses on feminist pedagogies within water and land protection movements in Chile, exploring how women’s organizations articulate climate justice through memory work, land-based knowledge, and imaginative practice. Supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2024–2026), a Climate Education Fellowship (2024–2025), and the Global Studies Fellowship Award from the University of Victoria (2025–2026), this work highlights community-led educational practices as catalysts for social and ecological transformation. She is also a co-applicant on an SSHRC Connection Grant (2025–present) that brings together museum and adult educators to address gender-based violence through their curatorial practice. Her scholarship broadens understandings of education beyond formal schooling to community education and social movement learning.
Dr. Diaz-Diaz’s recent publications reflect the breadth of her research in feminist, decolonial, and ecological education, as well as her commitment to social justice. In The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education (2025), her co-authored article “Decolonial Provocations through Ecofeminist Pedagogies” examines how women land and water protectors in Chile use imagination and arts-based practices to resist patriarchal colonial systems and cultivate alternative ways of living well in times of ecological precarity. “Grappling with Wicked Problems: Teacher Professionalism and Pedagogical Mappings for Reparative Futures” (2024), co-authored with Jessica Willows, considers how teachers grapple with systemic injustices and develop professional practices oriented toward reparative futures. In collaboration with the Feminist Imaginary Research Network (a group working in both academe and museums), “The Weaving is Us: Decolonizing the Tools for the Feminist Imagination” (2024) theorizes weaving as an epistemic and spiritual practice which, following Coast Salish teachings, challenges the dominance of rationality and opens pathways for collective and relational knowledge production.
Across her teaching, research, and community partnerships, Dr. Diaz-Diaz invites us to see pedagogy not simply as instruction but as a means for imagining and enacting relational and sustainable futures. Her work continues to deepen understandings of how community-rooted and land-informed learning can reshape educational systems toward greater social and ecological justice.
F T