Latest Updates

2025

• Upcomming: I am preparing to shoot my latest documentary (in collaboration with Bolivian filmmaker Luciana Decker Orozco), focusing on the struggle for legal recognition of a Guaraní community impacted by new gas development in and around Bolivia’s Tariquía National Reserve. Stay tuned for further updates!

• February 2025: The Special Issue Leaks: The politics of awkward circulations in Latin America’s geographies of energy production, co-edited by Penelope with Maria Cariola Ericksson, Stine Krøijer, and Mattias Borg Rasmussen, is now out!.

• February 2025: My individual paper, Cuts, Flows, and Leaks: Enclaving Practices and Countertopographies at Bolivia’s Hydrocarbon-Conservation Frontier, interrogates the spatial practices and politics involved in remaking Bolivia’s protected areas as territories of extraction, focusing on the ongoing conflict over natural gas development in the Tariquía National Reserve of Flora and Fauna.

• February 2025: I recently gave a talk about my work at Cafe Biocultural, Tarija City, Bolivia, followed by a lively debate on extractivism and resistance with local participants. For photos and more details about the event, please visit the Public Engagement page.

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.