Karine Narahara (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Texas (UNT). Dr. Narahara is an anthropologist with extensive experience in environmental public policy and in collaborating with Black, Afro-Indigenous, and Native American communities in Brazil (including the Amazon) and Argentina. Her research interests include Environmental Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Ethnographic Methods, and Latin America. In her recent book, based on her Ph.D. dissertation, she presents an ethnography of the Mapuche people and their conflicts with the oil industry in Patagonia. A brief explanation of her research with the Mapuche can be found here. Dr. Narahara is also a member of the Ilê Axé Aganju Ixolá, a Candomblé community in Rio de Janeiro, with whom she has been collaborating on a book project about the journeys of Afro-Brazilian spiritual leaders in a post-slavery context. This research led her to investigate alternative archival records created by Afro-Indigenous communities. From that, she is now working on the "Okra Archives" project, a multispecies ethnography that explores plants as devices of ancestral memory. She is also currently co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Applied Anthropology (forthcoming 2026). She is an Associate Editor of the Mediações Journal (Brazil) and part of the Board of Advisors of the Journal of Political Economy and Development (Brazil).

MOVAL!

MULTISPECIES AND ONTOLOGICAL VISUALIZATIONS ANTHROPOLOGY LAB

Anthropology has been shaken by what we call the "ontological turn" of the discipline, as the distinction nature/culture maybe not be the best way to approach many scenarios of the ongoing environmental crisis. These new perspectives developed into ethnographic experimentations that, in dialogue with arts, media, environmental sciences, and philosophy, are looking for new ways of telling what is happening around us, through the possibility of producing modes of narrating less centered on humanity - an urgent need if we want to create new futures where different forms of life have their places and autonomies guaranteed.

Considering this context, Dr. Narahara currently maintains a research group centered on Multispecies Ethnographies, involving undergraduate and graduate students from different fields, both the US and Brazil, at the Department of Anthropology. These are some of the books and special issues that they have been reading: "The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds" and "A world in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions", by Thom Van Dooren; "A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A theory of meaning", by Von Uexküll; "Steps to an Ecology of the Mind", by Gregory Bateson; "Exploring New Routes in the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities", by Lucio De Capitani and Shaul Bassi; and "Toward a Critique of Posthuman Futures", by Bart Simon. In the long run, the group aims to create a space of collaboration on new possibilities of storytelling, through different types of writings and media, that question the usual boundaries and canons of anthropological production.

If you are interested in joining the group, please send Dr. Narahara an email!

Education

2018, Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

2011, M.A., Cultural Anthropology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

2017, Lic., Social Sciences, Lutheran University of Brazil

2003, B.S., Biological Sciences, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Selected Publications

Medeiros, Claudio, and Karine L. Narahara. 2025. "A River-Ruin and the West Syndrome." In Atafona: cartografias, arquivos e imaginários da terra em erosão (Atafona: cartographies, archives and land imaginaries in erosion), edited by Julia Naidin and Fernando Codeço. Niterói: LABAC - UFF. 

Narahara, Karine L. “Foreword." 2024. In Bianca Dieili. In the Heart of the Earth: The Controversies of Fracking in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro: Letra Capital. 358p. 

Narahara, Karine L. and Thiago M. Cardoso. Dossier Which World in Ruins? The Anthropocene at Stake, Revista de Antropologia Social - R@U, v. 14, n. 2, 2022.

Narahara, Karine L. and Inara Nascimento. Special Issue When the 'Other' is the Anthropologist: Reflections on Contemporary Ethnographic Productions, Revista Mediações, v. 27, n. 3, Dec. 2022.

Narahara, Karine. 2022. L. In Mapuche's Territory: Petroleum Companies and Cosmopolitics in Argentinian Patagonia. Rio de Janeiro: Ape'ku. 380 p.

Narahara, Karine L. Petroleum companies and cosmopolitical practices in Mapuche's territory. Tellus, Campo Grande, MS, ano 21, n. 46, p. 185-212, 2021.

Book Review

Santos, Antonela. Karine Lopes Narahara. Em territorio mapuche. Petroleiras e cosmopolíticas na Patagonia argentina. Río de Janeiro: Ape'Ku. 2022.

Book Review Translated to English

Selected Presentations

Breathing with Volcanoes: Life and Cosmopolitics in Mapuche Territory. NSF Workshop Indigenous Knowledge Holders of the Mountains. 46^th Society of Ethnobiology Annual Meeting. Reno.

A Book for My Great-grandmother – or Weaving History from Strands. Panel Narrations of Black Lives through Intersections of Gendered, Geographical, and Generational Spaces. 83rdAnnual College Language Association Convention. Vancouver (US).

Racializing the Anthropocene: Afro-Indigenous Crossings from South America. Conference Voices of the Global South on the Anthropocene: Archaeological, Historical and Ancestral Perspectives. Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Germany.

Narahara, Karine L. 2020. "An Anthropology Beyond the 'Other': Reflections of A Black Anthropologist Among the Mapuche". Paper presented at the 32nd Meeting of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology (ABA).

Narahara, Karine L. 2021. "Petroleum Companies and Cosmopolitical Practices in Mapuche's Territory". Paper presented at the XIII Biennal Conference of the Society for Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA), University of Virginia.

Art Production

Diáspora so(u)l, dance performance by Camila Daniel and Karine L. Narahara, directed by Camila Daniel. Creative Alliance Center, Baltimore, MD, December 7, 2019.

Between the Margin and the Center, directed by Karine L. Narahara, edited by Marcelo Bichara, 2011.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

ANTH 3200 Latin America

ANTH 4400 Environmental Anthropology (in-person)

ANTH 5031 Ethnographic and Qualitative Methods

ANTH 5400 Environmental Anthropology (in-person and online)