Juliana Barnet is a social justice activist, writer, anti-colonial anthropologist, musician, educator, Spanish language organizer, interpreter and translator for labor unions and other entities supporting Latin American working people in Mexico and the US. She has participated in many movements for a just society, from the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements as a child and teen, to worker, student and social movements in Mexico (where she lived for nearly two decades), Central America, and the DC metropolitan area.
Juliana has participated in starting, running, and writing for numerous grassroots organizations, initiatives, and publications, in Mexico and in the US, and has studied social movements in numerous places. She also makes movement music; does writing and art projects with young people; and writes fiction featuring activists, including social justice mystery Rainwood House Sings [coming soon!], co-authored and illustrated with her daughter, Sophie Barnet-Higgins.
She has been an IPS Associate Fellow since 2017. Protect Our Activists, the project she is currently developing, seeks to foster a better climate for activists through raising awareness of activist culture and the tensions, dangers, dilemmas and joys of life in the belly of the Beast that activists are struggling to transform.
Juliana has a BA in anthropology and education from the University of Minnesota and a degree in Ethnology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History) in Mexico City.