Notes on contributors

Jonathan Alderman is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich, and has previously been a Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London. He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews, an MA in Latin American Studies from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Essex. His work explores subject formation in the US–Mexico borderland and in Andean Bolivia, and how the relationships between people and the state and the landscape in the Andes are mediated through infrastructure and ritual.

Ursula Balderson is currently working on a project about labour responses to climate change at the Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change at the University of Leeds. Prior to this she completed a postdoctoral project at the University of Cambridge. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose work considers the socio-political and emotional dimensions of infrastructure projects and how work and workers will be affected by the transition to a greener economy. She obtained her PhD from Newcastle University.

Sarah Bennison is a Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she has worked since 2017. Her interdisciplinary Andeanist research interests include water customs, customary law, khipus and community texts. With a primary interest in Peru, she specialises in irrigation rituals of the Huarochirí province (Lima) from the early colonial era to the current day. She graduated from Newcastle University in 2016 with a PhD in Iberian and Latin American studies funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her first book, The Entablo Manuscript: Water Rituals and Khipu Boards of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, will be published by University of Texas Press in 2023.

Julie Dayot has a background in Economics (from the École Normale Supérieure of Cachan) and after seven months of travel across South America – where she first encountered mining conflicts in the midst of protests in Cajamarca, Peru – she decided to apply for an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Oxford. Her MPhil research brought her back to Latin America, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she analysed the dilemmas between ‘difference’ and ‘equality’ faced by the Quichua inhabitants of the Lower Napo River – where oil extraction projects come with environmental impacts, but also a ‘social compensation’ in the domains of health, education and basic services. Based on an eight-month second period of fieldwork in the Lower Napo River of the Ecuadorian Amazon, her PhD thesis is an ethnographic investigation of the acceptance of an oil extraction project by the Quichua communities of the Lower Napo River.

Nicole Fadellin is visiting faculty in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University. She has previously worked as a curator for the National Library of Peru, the Peruvian Ministry of Culture, and the House of Peruvian Literature. Her research focuses on the relationship between infrastructure studies and Latin American literary studies. She has examined the promise of infrastructure in contemporary Caribbean literature, and her next project explores cultural representations of energy infrastructure in the wake of the Cold War. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yuri Gama is currently a Latin American History PhD candidate, and an Instructor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. With a master’s degree in Liberal Studies and a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences, his ongoing dissertation examines the urban history of Northeast Brazil between 1890 and 1990. Analysing urban planning, industrialisation, and development, his research unveils the intersection of affordable housing, citizenship and nation building while dissecting authorities and elites ideas and practices. Yuri’s writings can be found in English and Portuguese on open-access and paywalled mediums such as Planning Perspectives, H-LatAm, and the Urban History Association website. Yuri has experience in oral history and public engagement, producing community-related journalistic and sociological content. Sharing his research and teachings, Yuri has been on podcasts, community radio shows, and published in blogs and ebooks. With experience in archival research and fieldwork, he has presented his research in Brazil, the United States and the UK.

Geoff Goodwin is a Lecturer in Global Political Economy at the University of Leeds. He previously taught at the London School of Economics, University of Oxford and University College London, and was a Research Associate at FLACSO-Quito. His interdisciplinary research focuses on land, water, infrastructure and activism in Ecuador and Colombia. He also recently started investigating water history, politics and infrastructure in London. He holds a PhD in Political Economy (University College London) and MA in Economics (University of Leeds).

Valeria Guarneros-Meza has a PhD in Public Policy. Her research focuses on the relationships between public management processes and citizen/community participation in contexts of local securitisation, informality and extractivism. Her research has been published in international and interdisciplinary journals such as Public Administration, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Latin American Perspectives.

Penny Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research has focused on infrastructures of social change, the material and social relations of modern statecraft, knowledge practices and the politics of value. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Peru looking at civic infrastructures projects including road construction, sanitation, and waste management systems. She co-founded the Beam network for social research on nuclear science and is currently engaged in the ethnographic study of nuclear infrastructures in the UK.

Sam Rumé is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He holds a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Aix-Marseille and an MA in Anthropology and Ethnography from the University of Barcelona. Having undertaken extensive fieldwork in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 2017–18 and 2020–21, his research focuses on the politics of urban change and sustainability, mobilities and infrastructures from a Latin American perspective.

Marcela Torres-Wong has a PhD in Political Science from the American University in Washington DC, a master’s degree in Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru, and a law degree from the same university. Her research areas include socio-environmental conflicts, extractive industries, indigenous movements, and participatory institutions in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. Since 2017 she has served as a professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO-Mexico). Before that she served as an Indigenous rights lawyer for Indigenous organisations in the Peruvian Amazon. Her research has been funded by prestigious institutions such as the Inter-American Foundation and the Tinker Foundation, both based in Washington DC, as well as the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris (CNRS). She has carried out fieldwork in the Amazon basin in Peru and Bolivia, El Chaco in Bolivia, and Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Mérida and San Luis Potosí in Mexico.

Diego Valdivieso received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Campus Villarrica of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Research. Diego’s work explores local configurations of the state, illustrated by the Chilean case, through the analysis of the everyday practices and experiences of state officials charged with the implementation of (rural) development programmes

Nicolás Valenzuela-Levi works as Assistant Professor at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile, teaching and doing research on issues of territorial studies and urban planning at the Department of Architecture. He obtained the Architecture and Master in Urban Development degrees from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and the MPhil in Development Studies and PhD in Land Economy from the University of Cambridge. His work concentrates on the link between urban infrastructure and inequalities, using the lens of institutional political economy and environmental sciences. He has published his work on sectors such as transport, telecommunications and waste management, including case studies such as Santiago de Chile, Medellin, London and Barcelona. As part of his non-academic work, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Metro de Santiago for the 2022–24 period.

Dr Clara Voyvodic Casabó is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol in the Department of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the impact of armed conflict, organised crime and development on local order, focusing on Colombia. She has also taught Politics, International Relations, International Security and Conflict, History of the Cold War and the World Wars, State Crime and Terrorism, and Political Philosophy.