Marina Moscoso Arabía

Marina Moscoso Arabía has a strong academic background in Social Sciences and Urban Studies. She has studied and/or conducted research in San Juan (Puerto Rico), Barcelona (Catalonia), Buenos Aires (Argentina) and the United States. Her current research focuses on the past and present of the squatting movement in Puerto Rico and the instrumentalization of the governmental apparatus as a real estate business. She is the co-founder of Casa Taft 169 (2013), a grassroots initiative pursuing the “off’ grid” rehabilitation of a long standing “public nuisance”, and Centro para la Reconstrucción del Habitat (2017), a nonprofit conceived to support access to nuisance properties for community benefit. Marina is currently a PhD student in Human Geography at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a minor in Gender Relations and International Development, and affiliated student of the Latin American Cities Collective. She is also an Improvise and Intervene Fellow, the 2nd cohort of the Humanities Research Institute’s Interseminars, an initiative funded in part by the Mellon Foundation.