Description:

In Peruvian mining politics, exposure to the heavy metal lead has become emblematic for the human cost of an extractive-based economy. Yet as environmentalists mobilize toxic injury to contest the ethics of Peru's rapidly expanded mining sector, their politics often clash not only with industry interests, but also with local modes of existence enabled by extractivism and mineral exposure itself.

Such social realities, in which exposure to minerals exists as the very means to make life possible, form the paradoxes and limits of environmentalism in Peru and ongoing ethicopolitical struggles over human life under neoextractivist governance.

Stefanie Graeter is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Science in Human Culture Program and the Department of Anthropology. She is developing her ethnographic research into article publications and a book manuscript on the politics of human life in zones of mineral production and exposure in Peru. She received her PhD in 2015 in sociocultural anthropology at UC Davis. 

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium. Find it on Facebook.

Description:

In the nearly two decades since the UN Protocol on Human Trafficking was passed, anti-trafficking activist organizations have taken increasingly innovative and high-tech approaches to solving international cases and garnering public support.

Tech companies, police, computer scientists, and activists now work together as “algorithmic detectives” by shared understandings of risk, sexuality, race, and exploitation online. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, cultural anthropology, and digital science and technology studies, SPAN postdoctoral fellow Mitali Thakor argues that these new digital campaigns against child trafficking are permitting unprecedented levels of online surveillance, legitimated in the name of “child protection.”

Mitali's ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, Thailand, and the US explores partnerships and tensions between international police, border control, computer scientists, UN bureaucrats, and activists as they develop algorithmic solutions to cases of exploitation and trafficking.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium. Find it on Facebook.

Description:

How do Indigenous Peoples and Organizations access and navigate global policy arenas like the Paris Climate Summit and the World Conservation Congress to influence international environmental policymaking? In this talk, Kim Marion Suiseeya examines the politics of representation to better understand the possibilities for and challenges to indigenous pursuits of justice.

Kim Marion Suiseeya’s research examines the interactions between norms, institutions, and justice in global forest governance. Her areas of expertise include environmental justice, global environmental governance, political ecology, and the politics of biodiversity conservation in Laos and mainland Southeast Asia.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium. Find it on Facebook.

Description:

Under what conditions do newly established governments consolidate their regimes? Often times, newly established governments face contention by organized challenger groups as well as resistance by diverse ethno-religious groups in society. If they hold alternative identities and ideologies than those promoted by the government, these sources of contention may delay or hinder the process of regime consolidation. Using agent-based modeling, this talk examines the societal conditions under which newly established governments become more likely to build societal support for their regimes.

Başak Taraktaş is a postdoctoral fellow at the Buffett Institute. Her dissertation examines the conditions under which opposition groups to authoritarian regimes are able to cooperate to successfully engineer regime change. 

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium.

Description:

What happens to indigenous food cultures during times of ongoing colonial settlement? This presentation theorizes the material and affective registers of taste qualities - sweet, cold, sour, and tepid - as indexes of changing political power within the Hawaiian Kingdom throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and argues that consideration of the palate is central to understanding what and how we eat in America today.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is a postdoctoral fellow in indigenous studies. Her research is concerned with how food and print media frames territorial occupation in 19th century settler colonial contexts. Her dissertation research uses frozen water, or ice, to explore the politics of ingestion, representation, and materiality in settler colonial Hawai’i.

This is part of the Buffett Institute Faculty & Fellows Colloquium. Find it on Facebook.