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ESRC Research Fellow
Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability
My central research interest is the cosmopolitics of climate change, exploring its potential for creating conversations across cultures and disciplines, and seeking to include marginalised voices into the international consideration of this vital issue (2019; 2021).
I consider how climate change in marginalised indigenous communities expands into a whole complex of changes, unseparated into categories of social and natural, and the provocations this presents to a modern frame of understanding (2019). I consider change over the last 50 years in the Bolivian Andes, taking Bastien’s 1972 ethnography of the village where I conducted fieldwork as a comparison point. I consider how cosmological relations with the landscape and its deities are changing or conversely have endured, describing it as a ‘cosmoscape’ (2020), where contrasting worlding practices come to the fore alternatively in certain times and contexts. I consider rural-urban migration, and rural-rural migration into the cash economies of the coca growing Yungas region: what draws young people to leave traditional economies and their associated cosmological systems (2016)? What replaces them? I consider the creation of an alternative to classic development models through incorporating indigenous voices in Bolivian Vivir Bien initiative (2018), and the dynamics of ethnic alterity characterising the country (2016; 2018), exemplified in the 2012 Tipnis March (2021).
My current interests are in conceptualising ‘collapse’ in the Andean region, using archaeological studies to explore environmental catastrophe and sudden social change over time. I carried out fieldwork on Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change in Caata (September 2021 to June 2022).
Education
2010- 2016 PhD Social Anthopology, University of Manchester. Thesis: Landscapes of Alterity: Climate change in Contemporary Bolivia (Part-time)
2005-2006 MA Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool. Thesis: Revolutionary Education in Mexico
2001-2004 BA Archaeology and Anthropology (Social Anthropology). Girton College, Cambridge University
Publications
2021 ‘The Recursive Indian: The Significance of Complementary Ethnic Alterity in the Bolivian Tipnis March’. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 40: 401 -415.
2020. ‘Constructing cosmoscapes: cosmological currents in conversation and contestation in contemporary Bolivia’. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10 (1): 195–208.
2020. "On Bolivian Lithium." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology, March 24.
2019. (Ed.) The ‘end of the world’? Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change. Palgrave Series in the Anthropology of Sustainability. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
2019. ‘Climate change and Contamination in a relational landscape’. In The ‘end of the world’? Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change, edited by Rosalyn Bold. Palgrave Series in the Anthropology of Sustainability. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
2018. Vivir Bien: a study in alterity. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 12:2, 113-132.
2013. ‘Living Landscapes: Climate Change in the Andes’. The Dark Mountain Project.