¡Hola!
I’m an ethnographer of contemporary Colombia interested in researching (de)militarized rural landscapes, post-conflict politics and economics, and multispecies relations of aid and care.
I’m an assistant professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.
My book manuscript, “Suspicious Landscapes: Humanitarian Demining and Peace Laboratories in Rural Colombia” is an ethnographic study of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and mine clearance in times of “political suspension.” Throughout my research, I pay special attention to the material, affective and political impacts of the presence and absence of improvised landmines, as well as to the temporality of the politics that emerge in spaces where war and peace are suspended.
My manuscript is concerned with what I have called ‘the non-explosive event.” I argue that landmines have the power to activate and orchestrate the emergence and consolidation of certain conditions of life (as well of death, disability, and debility) in the Colombian countryside, even when they do not explode or are physically absent; this is the case of recently demined and so-called released rural areas.
Suspicion (and, its correlated term, trust) might be conceived of as expressions of this non-explosive capacity.
This ethnography is based on two years of fieldwork in the “Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining,” a peace initiative that brought guerrillas and army soldiers together to work in the removal of improvised landmines planted in peasant villages during the decades-long war.
My work is inspired by diverse scholarly fields, especially ethnographic theory, feminist science and technology studies, critical humanitarian studies, and political ecology.
My research has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of California President’s Office, the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and the Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies Dean’s office at UC Davis.
Curriculum Vitae; Cultural Studies at UCD; Academia Profile; Research