Joel E. Correia is a human-environment geographer whose research and teaching focus on  intersections of human rights, development, and environmental change with attention to Indigenous politics and decolonization in Latin America.

He writes about and investigates struggles for justice in the context of radical social-ecological change. Much of that work examines dynamics of large-scale infrastructure development, expanding extractive frontiers, deforestation, Indigenous rights, territorialities, and social movements. His current and recent field-based research projects are based in the Gran Chaco (Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina) and the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Correia is currently working on projects related to Indigenous territorial management and land rights, the implementation of Inter-American Court of Human Rights decisions, expanding agrarian frontiers, political ecologies of infrastructure, and relationships between biocultural diversity, climate change mitigation, and just conservation policy.