Curtis Kline

Curtis received his Ph.D in Political Science from Colorado State University in 2025. His research mainly focuses on the intersections between indigenous governance, food systems, and community development. In collaboration with indigenous communities across Colombia, Curtis uses varied qualitative methods to identify how Indigenous communities are adapting to changing agro-ecological systems and how they are designing strategies to overcome vulnerabilities. Concretely, through community-engaged research, he works alongside communities to demonstrate how the declaration of GMO-Free Territories represent the efforts of Indigenous peoples to maintain autonomous local food production and political systems.

Prior to joining the Ph.D. program at Colorado State University, Curtis gained years of experience as a practitioner accompanying rural, Indigenous, and underrepresented communities as they developed projects of sustainable agriculture and water governance in Latin America. This involved the design of community-based research projects which included adult and community-based popular education initiatives; methods of collaborative project planning, monitoring, and evaluation; network building; and more.