This QUALIFIE Working Group session features a presentation by Dr. Leonidas Oikonomakis (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).
What makes ethnography political? How can political ethnography be a tool to engage with the social and political dimensions and meanings of environmental issues and challenges? How can political ethnography engage with local communities? What are the politics of ethnography? In the first part of this talk, Leonidas Oikonomakis (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) discusses political ethnography as a method. Then, he presents results of his current research project 'FlyBal'. This project engages with timber (Balsa) extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazonas. Balsa is a type of timber that is mostly produced in Ecuador, the world's largest balsa producer for decades. The demand for balsa has skyrocketed over the past few years due to demand from wind turbin industry, and illegal balsa trade is - indirectly - responsible for some of the Amazon's illegal deforestation. Drawing from already existing literature on the windmills' installation, Leonidas moves 'backwards' to see the process of extraction. With this, he contributes understandings of green energy, its contradictions, and its lived experience, based on genealogy of extractivism in the Amazonas.
Speaker:
Leonidas Oikonomakis holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the EUI. He is a political ethnographer with significant research experience in Mexico, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Greece, who currenlty holds a Maria Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral individual Fellowship at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research and teaching focuses on Latin American politics, social movements, autonomy, revolutions, electoral politics, development, and the commons. He is author of the monograph 'Political Strategies and Social Movements in Latin America: The Zapatistas and Bolivian Cocaleros' and of the ethnographic novel called 'Skouries' (together with Dimitris Dalakoglou, illustrated by Apostolis - Kotsifas Blackbird Ioannou).
The Zoom link will be sent upon registration.