projects

the politics of abundance

peru

My most significant project to date is based in Peru. Long before Peru was identified in global consicousness as one of the world’s “underdeveloped” or “developing” nations, it was a site of treasure. A target for colonial plunder. A land of plenty. A bench of gold. Today, that legacy reverberates in complicated ways. In my book, Acts of Growth: Development and the Politics of Abundance in Peru (2022), I follow ideologies of long-standing Peruvian abundance into initiatives that sit at the surprisingly faint boundary line between sustainable development and extractive industry.

The “abundance” theme, impossible to contain, has also spawned more of my writing. My efforts to follow Peruvian abundance have led me to publish articles about the longer history of the colonial search for treasure in the Andes; rural villagers who engage with Peru’s national brand; the contradictions of identity-based entrepreneurship; a theoretical conversation about the politics of self-presentation; a collaborative engagement with debt as a global formation; and the promises and struggles of one family’s discovery of gold on their land.

(Please email me if you’re unable to access any of the articles I’ve linked above, and I’d be happy to send them your way.)

living through climate change

peru, the maldives, the united states

The second project I’m engaged in looks at how communities endure, get through, and respond to climate change. This is a multi-sited, comparative, and longitudinal tracking of experiences, observations, political responses, and localized scientific understandings of climate change.

One aspect of this project, conducted in affiliation with a European Research Council-funded study on Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts based out of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, involves compiling and tracking the ways people are tracking and measuring climate change in their own daily lives in the Peruvian Andes. I’m one of about sixty researchers compiling this data around the world.

Another aspect of the research is be a series of comparative critical ethnographies of the globalized concept of adaptation as a widespread neoliberal template in Peru, the Maldives, and the United States.

I began this work with a study of how climate change came to be fundamental to democratic state-making in the Maldives. After one person I spoke to there - I called him “Hussein” in my article - told me that humans should be able to move around the world more easily, I started to think more about resilience as an articulation of power. Does Hussein’s analysis about mobility as a kind of freedom apply elsewhere? I brought my curiosity to the Peruvian Andes, whose residents have long been highly mobile. This is often out of economic necessity, but it’s also clear that many of my interlocutors there found joy in the ability to live in multiple places at the same time. I found that issues of verticality and urban-rural cultural relations (that latter piece was written in collaboration with my trusted colleague Kyle Jones) are so important to daily life there, and also play a role in deep tensions over how best to make a living in the face of economic and environmental change.

welcoming city

the united states

My third project involves a sustained engagement with the community of refugees and migrants in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It is rooted in my Environmental Migration Lab on F&M’s campus, which is the site of a broad, collaborative, and frequently student-led effort to learn how environmental change and migration impact one another. For four years, with a team of undergraduate research assistants, I have been interviewing members of this community to try to understand (1) the role, if any, of environmental change in their forced migration, and (2) how environmental change came into their lives as part of the texture of their migration journey.

“Welcoming City” - named for Lancaster’s recent designation as the first Welcoming City in Pennsylvania - will be an early-2022 installation in the Winter Visual Arts Center at Franklin & Marshall, curated during a residency I began at the center in Fall 2021. The space will include artifacts, maps, climate data, political-economic information, and anonymized recorded narratives based on the testimonies that my students and I have been gathering since 2017.