Overview
Elizabeth Barrios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at Albion College. Her research explores ecology, energy humanities, and Latin American and Latina/o literature and media, with an emphasis on Venezuela and its diaspora. She is the author of Failures of the Imagination: Reckoning with Oil in Venezuelan Cultural Production (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026), which examines how Venezuelan literature and media have confronted the social and ecological toll of oil, often in ways overlooked or deliberately obscured by critics and institutions. Her work has appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Transnational Cinemas, among other venues. She is also conducting an ongoing oral history project titled Climate Stories of the Venezuelan Andes. Her pedagogical innovations have been recognized by Albion’s Teaching Innovation Award (2021), Students’ Choice Award (2022), and Teacher of the Year Award (2025).
Research Focus
Plastic Environmentalisms: Petrocultures and Climate Denial in Latin America
Plastic Environmentalisms: Petrocultures and Climate Denial in Latin America examines how oil companies in Latin America use environmentalist aesthetics and discourse to delegitimize climate activism and sustain fossil fuel extraction. The project reads across time periods to reveal a recurring logic in how the oil industry, as well as some of its critics, conceptualizes “nature.” To do so, it analyzes seventy years of oil-funded PR materials and cultural production in Venezuela, Colombia, and Perú—art exhibit ephemera, trade and cultural magazines, photography books, science and technology museum displays, landscaping practices, social media campaigns, and more. These greenwashing campaigns often emerged or intensified during moments of crisis, particularly when oil companies entered into conflict with Indigenous communities. By placing these sources in conversation with contemporary theoretical questions about climate change, the project argues that undoing the fossil-fuel status quo requires disentangling the very idea of “nature” or the “natural” as sites or states of purity.
At the center of this analysis is what Barrios terms “plastic environmentalism”: depictions of nature as a space or state of timeless beauty, untouched by decay, transformation, or contamination. Barrios links this impulse to the petrochemical industry’s development of plastics—seemingly sanitized materials that promise permanence but have become environmental scourges. Disentangling ecology from plastic environmentalism, the project contends, requires reckoning with the multiple, relational scales involved not only in oil production but also in the life-and-death cycles of ecosystems and the biosphere.