Latest Updates

2026

• Upcomming: On 17 March, my film Urukurenda will be screened in Durham Geography by supported by the Politics-State-Space Research Cluster and Decolonial Geographies Thematic Group. With a response from Nawal Watali, followed by Q&A. Click here for details.

• January 2026: I submitted by review of Andrea Marston’s excellent book Subterranean Matters, which will form part of a forthcoming book review forum in Political Geography. My response is titled: “Unsettling sovereignties, enduring dependencies: towards a relational reading of subterranean matters”.

• February 2026: Our edited volume Territories of Life: Equivocations, Entanglements, and Endurances (University of Alberta Press, 2026) is now available to purchase! Co-edited with Mario Blaser and Sylvie Poirier, it features work by Indigenous scholars, activists and allies.

2025

• December 2025: My partner Aldo Villena has finally joined me in the UK!

• November 2025: I enjoyed acting as Discussant/Chair for the Durham Anthropology Layton Dialogues event on “Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change”, with excellent guest speakers Prof Beth Rose Middleton Manning (University of California Davis) and Prof Jay Mistry (Royal Holloway).

• November 2025: I gave a keynote, “Decolonising territory through land reform? Lessons from Bolivia’s Native Community Lands”, at the International Symposium on Scotland Land Reform Futures in Aberdeen. Great to learn more about the push for community land rights in Scotland and see Scottish policy makers wanting to learn from Latin America!

• November 2025: I gave an invited talk at the University of Cambridge’s Infrastructural Geographies seminar series. Titled “Infrastructural affects and (contested) hydrocarbon futures in Bolivia”, my talk was based on a chapter of my book manuscript Untapped Reserves: Contesting Space and Nature at Bolivia’s Extraction-conservation Frontier.

• October 2025: I was grateful for the invitation to be a panelist in an excellent event on Extractive Economies/Insurgent Ecologies at the School of Politics and International Relations, QMUL.

• October 2025: My new documentary film Urukurenda has been featured in a Bilingual Intervention Urban Futures of Popular Neighbourhoods: An (Audio)Visual Roundtable in Antipode.

• September 2025: My chapter Plurinational Juristocracy and Rights from Below at Bolivia’s Gas Frontier is now out - with no paywall! Based on my ongoing research in the Tariquía Reserve, it forms part of a legal anthropology collection edited by Mark Goodale and Olfaf Zenker: Reckoning with Law in Excess: Mobilization, Confrontation, Refusal. Published open access by Cambridge University Press, all chapters can be downloaded without cost.

• August 2025: My documentary Urukurenda: In Search of the Land Without Evil (Ĩvĩ Maraëï) is now available to watch open access on my YouTube channel with a choice of English or Spanish subtitles.

• August 2025: I gave a keynote on “Conjuring property at extractive frontiers” at the ERC Urban Frontiers project retreat on the Isle of Møn, Denmark. It was great to learn about the postdocs’ diverse research projects over the course of a week.

• June 2025: My documentary Urukurenda was presented as legal evidence in a case brought by Urukurenda’s community leader against the departmental government of Tarija for denying their legal personhood as an Indigenous community. The struggle continues…

• June 2025: I am honoured to have been shortlisted for the Teaching and Learning Awards 2025 in the category Excellence in Postgraduate Supervision.

• March 2025: I had a great time at the Association of American Geographers Annual Congress in Detroit. I participated in two panels on “Legal geographies from South America” and was a critic for two Author-Meets-Critics sessions: for Andrea Marston’s Subterranean Matters (Duke University Press, 2025) and for Michael Goldman, Nancy Peluso and Wendy Wolford’s edited volume The Social Lives of Land (Cornell University Press, 2024) – both highly recommended!

2024

• 9th November 2024: I testified in a Bolivian court hearing in defence of community members from Chiquiacá Canton in Bolivia’s Tariquía Reserve, who are facing criminal charges for obstructing the entry of oil companies Petrobras and YPFB into their communities without prior consultation and contrary to a recent vote by local peasant unions. My documentary Don’t Touch Tariquía was presented as evidence in the case, which it is hoped will pave the way for an appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

• 1 September 2024: Started my one-year British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. My project, Untapped Reserves: Mapping Extraction and Resistance in Bolivia’s Protected Areas, will involve new research, the completion of a book manuscript, and the production of a documentary film based on my research on gas extraction in Bolivia’s Tariquía Reserve.

• 20 August 2024: This week I completed an intensive course on non-extractive filmmaking with the African film collective AFRISOS. The training, offered by Durham University, involved working in a group to make a short film under the guidance of mentors Jigar Ganatra and Thige Njuguna.

• 16 August 2024: Article accepted by Journal of Latin American Geography. My article, Cuts, Flows, and Leaks: Enclave Imaginaries, Neoextractivist Territorialisation, and Countertopographies of Resistance at Bolivia’s Extraction-Conservation Frontier will be part of the Leaks Project Special Issue titled The Politics of Awkward Circulations in Latin America’s New and Old Geographies of Energy Production.

• 15 July 2024: New paper published in Antipode: Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene: Racial Capitalism, Violent Materialities, and the Colonial Politics of Representation. Co-authored with Prof. Kiran Asher, it is available open access Here.

• 3 July 2024: Attended the Society for Latin American Studies Annual Conference in Amsterdam. I participated in a panel on Indigenous Citizenship and shared reflections from my work with Guaraní people of Bolivia.