Research

Situated in contemporary Colombia, my current research explores experimental practices built around humanitarian efforts to demine territories formerly ravaged by wars. I focus on political and technical practices through which an assortment of social actors seeks to recuperate, remake, and cultivate territorial engagements amidst lasting civil wars, violent occupations, and ongoing peace initiatives.

My next research project is a multi-sited ethnographic research that comparatively examines the sensorial sphere inhabited and partially shared by humans and dogs working on the detection of explosive materials in heterogenous war-landscapes.

These projects are connected by my more general interest in the tools and processes through which people intervene and reconfigure violently occupied lives and worlds, and the ways that ethics and politics are folded into and emerge from technoscientific and humanitarian processes.

My work is inspired by and contributes to diverse scholarly fields, including anthropological studies of military waste, post-conflict environmental politics, and reparation and reconciliation processes. I am also in conversation with ethnographic theory, feminist studies of science and technology, and critical humanitarian studies. 

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.

Landscapes of Suspicion

Senses in Translation