maya weeks

Hi! My name is Maya. I’m a critical geographer, writer, and artist. My research focuses on plastic pollution, gender, and, increasingly, wool production. A more detailed biography of mine is below.

Interested in having me guest lecture in your classroom, lead a workshop for a group, or strategize with you about feminist or creative approaches to research? Send me a message!

Dr. Maya Weeks is a feminist political ecologist, writer, and artist from the rural Central Coast of California who works on land stewardship from an environmental justice perspective. She is a first-generation college student and holds her B.A. in Language Studies (Spanish) from the University of California in Santa Cruz and M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California in Davis, where she wrote her dissertation on marine pollution as a form of economic violence using both qualitative and creative methods. Recent poetry has been published in Rabbit and recent nonfiction has been published in Zócalo Public Square. A record, Tethers, is out on Full Spectrum Records. She has exhibited at at Vague Research Studios and performed at Historical Materialism. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside (these signals press, 2016). Recent artist residencies include The Arctic Circle and Konstepidemin. She is an affiliated researcher at the University of California in Davis Feminist Research Institute, a member of the Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, and a member of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory. Maya loves to surf and is in training as a shepherd; she is an alum of Grazing School of the West, New Cowgirl Camp, and the Hopland Research and Extension Center’s shearing school. She is grateful to be a guest living and working on Northern Chumash and Salinan land.