Blog
New team members: Meet Florencia Paz Landeira and Emily Murray
In January 2024, Florencia Paz Landeira and Emily Murray moved to Ireland all the way from Argentina and Canada, respectively, to join the Youth Climate Justice project. With backgrounds in social anthropology, global health, and participatory research methods, we are delighted to have them on board to bring their diverse expertise to the project.
Dr. Florencia Paz Landeira
Florencia Paz Landeira is an anthropologist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and later earned her PhD in Social Anthropology at the National University of San Martin. She has served as a lecturer at both institutions.
Her enduring interest lies in understanding children's rights as a field of contention, considering normative transformations in Argentina and Latin America, along with their institutional, material, and socio-cultural effects. As part of her broader research focus on the productivity of human rights, her doctoral thesis explores how children's rights are appropriated, intertwined, and strained by the social investment approach and brain-based arguments in the transnational early childhood development agenda.
In recent years, her research has shifted towards exploring children's experiences and perspectives on climate crises, with a focus on the role of children's rights in socio-environmental conflicts. She argues that understanding how children live, cope with, and challenge the current climate crisis could contribute to a reconceptualization of children's rights with more agentive, collective, and political approaches.
Florencia has experience engaging with children and youth through participatory and educational projects from a human rights perspective. She has collaborated on projects with policymakers for the design and implementation of childhood policies at the local level. Since 2017, she has contributed as a researcher to various consulting projects for UNICEF.
Emily Murray
Emily Murray is an interdisciplinary researcher from Barrie, Ontario, Canada with a diverse education background and many passions. She holds a Bachelor of Medical Sciences from Western University and an MSc in Global Health from McMaster University. After graduating in 2022, she spent time travelling, living abroad and exploring her research interests which guided her towards the next step: a PhD!
Over the years, her interests have shifted and come together in unique ways. Following her global health research on the harmonisation of Indigenous and Western medicine and the connection between human health and nature, Emily entered the world of environmental law and climate governance research with colleagues in Brazil and Norway, focusing on the rights of nature, the co-creation of knowledge and participatory research methodologies in law. Towards the end of 2022, she co-authored a book entitled “Follow Your Heart: the school for multipotentialites”, led workshops on multipotentiality with children, and began developing a passion for emotional and ecological education. Altogether, these experiences have culminated in many different areas of interest which led Emily to the exciting Youth Climate Justice project! In her PhD research, she will explore the intersection between climate justice, children’s health and the right to a healthy environment and engage in participatory fieldwork to better understand and integrate views and experiences of children and young people in climate justice spaces.
Aside from academia, Emily loves spending time in nature either hiking, skiing or camping; exploring new cities and discovering cosy cafes; and connecting with friends and family around the world.