Join Sandra Rodríguez Castañeda for a discussion on Colonialism, Capitalism and the Environment

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The event will include contributions from the following speakers:

Maan Barua (Cambridge, Geography) is an environmental and urban geographer whose research focuses on the economies, ontologies and politics of the living and material world. He is the author of Lively Cities (University of Minnesota Press) which examines the relationship between human and non-human lifeworlds of contemporary urban environments and Plantation Worlds (Duke University Press) which examines the socionatural transformations produced by plantations in the Indian state of Assam.

Luis Andueza (Kings College, Development Studies) draws on human geography, anthropology, and critical Marxist theory to examine nature/society relations and the political ecology of extractivism in Latin America. His ethnographic work explores conflicts protagonized by Mapuche peoples over water and energy infrastructure in contemporary Chile.

Jack Jenkins Hill (UCL, Anthropology) is a doctoral researcher whose fieldwork explores how the Karen indigenous people, who have historically fought an armed insurgency with the Burmese government, employ international legal frameworks for forest conservation and indigenous rights to contest notions of sovereignty and territoriality and build what they term 'revolutionary forests'.

Sandra Rodríguez Castaneda (UCL, Institute of the Americas) doctoral research investigates the reproduction of life in the toxic geography of Cerro de Pasco - a historic mining site in Peru and a pivotal node of racial capitalism in the Americas. Her work seeks to bridge the study of reproductive and environmental politics through investigating the social labour necessary to sustain life within indigenous mining communities affected by centuries of environmental pollution.

Megan Vaughan (UCL, Institute of Advanced Studies) who will act as discussant is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work has examined the history of medicine and psychiatry in Africa, on the history of famine, food supply and gender relations and on slavery in the Indian Ocean region.