My Research

My research focuses on struggles over indigeneity, territory, and resource extraction in Latin America, grounded in over 15 years of ethnographic work in Bolivia’s Chaco region.

My work has shaped inter-disciplinary debates on extractivism, territory and decolonial politics. In particular, I have made theoretical advances to scholarly understandings of the relationship between hydrocarbons and citizenship in neoextractivist states, the limits and legacies of neoliberal multiculturalism (ethnoterritorial recognition) for Indigenous movements, and the micropolitics of race and property at (post)colonial frontiers.

Concretely, my research has involved a series of in-depth case studies that illuminate how fossil capitalism articulates with (post)colonial struggles over territory and citizenship in ways that produce new subjectivities, governable spaces, and political horizons. These have included a Guaraní territorial claim overlying Bolivia’s biggest gas field, a regional autonomy project that linked plurinationalism to gas rents, and a conflict over gas development in a protected area.

My approach is interdisciplinary and engages a range of critical literatures on law, rights, extraction, territory, indigeneity, and (de)coloniality. In addition to ethnographic methods, I have deployed counter-mapping and documentary filmmaking to examine the micropolitics of land, law, and extractivism as they shape Indigenous autonomy and citizenship.

Current Research Project

Untapped Reserves: Mapping Extraction and Resistance in Bolivia’s Protected Areas

In 2024, I was honored to receive a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, which will support my further research, the development of a book manuscript, and the production of a second documentary film. This work will focus on the political and territorial dynamics of gas extraction in Bolivia’s Tariquía Reserve of Flora and Fauna.

Projects

LEAKS – Extractive Enclaves and Unintended Flows

As a co-investigator on the LEAKS project (2019–2023), funded by the Independent Research Fund of Denmark, my research focused on conflicts over new natural gas development in the Tariquia National Reserve of Flora and Fauna. I examined the spatial practices involved in neoextractivist territorialisation and how local women activists have resisted these through countertopographies that mobilise around extraction’s leaky materialities. The research further illustrates how conservation geographies have become implicated in the governance of extraction in Bolivia’s protected areas. A first article from this research will be published in the forthcoming Leaks Special Issue in the Journal of Latin American Geography.

Rule and Rupture: Local state-formation through the production of property and citizenship

As a postdoc on the European Research Council-funded project led by Christian Lund (2016-2019), I investigated how conflicts over territory and gas rents in the Bolivian Chaco are giving rise to new forms of governable spaces. Through an institutional ethnography of a new Autonomous Regional Government of Gran Chaco Province, I explored how constitutional provisions for a plurinational state in Bolivia were used to pursue regionalist claims for a fixed share of gas rents. My research highlighted the limits of such political spaces for Chaco Indigenous Peoples, whose own claims for territorial autonomy remain unviable as they face ongoing forms of dispossession linked to hydrocarbon development.

The Elusive Promise of Territory: limits and legacies of Indigenous land rights in Bolivia

My doctoral research examined the dynamics and legacies of Bolivia’s Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (Native Community Lands), collective territories financed by the World Bank as part of Latin America’s multicultural “territorial turn”. This research focused on TCO Itika Guasu, a Guaraní territorial claim overlying Bolivia’s biggest gas field and raised critical questions about the limits of multicultural forms of recognition to redress colonial land relations and capitalist forms of dispossession. I also highlighted how these land-titling legacies continue to shape Indigenous territorial politics under the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government.

A select list of publications from prior research is available on my publications page.