Cameron Zarrabzadeh

Cameron Zarrabzadeh is a PhD student in the Ethnology subfield of the Anthropology department at UNM. He graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2010 with a dual degree in English Literature and Studio Art and completed an MA in Ethnology at UNM in 2021. For his PhD research, he seeks to interrogate human rights issues and conflicts that emerge between the interests of different groups in the context of environmental degradation and its impacts on human health in the American Southwest.

He intends to center his research on exploitative environmental and social interactions driven by extractive resource industries in the region. One potential dissertation topic concerns the issue of uranium tailings seeping into water supplies and affecting the human health of a particular Navajo community in New Mexico.

Research interests: semiotics, discourse, science & technology studies, political ecology, social and environmental conflict in the American Southwest