I am a political anthropologist with an interest in extractive (hydrocarbon) resource regimes and privatizing knowledge economies.  I see both as central lenses for the anthropology of the state amid intensifying contests over resources, capital accumulation, and regionalizing forms of rule.  My work seeks to understand how social movements contest and engage these processes while enacting and imagining their own alternative political and epistemic orders.

Native Languages and the Decolonization of Knowledge

    My primary area of research has been through engaged collaboration with indigenous movements mobilizing for decolonizing forms of state education in Bolivia.  To this end, I worked with the Guarani People's Assembly for several years, and wrote an historical and ethnographic study of education reform and indigenous language bilingual education politics in Bolivia. (New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). I continue work on language politics, education, and decolonization in Latin America.

The Bolivia-Brazil Project

The arrival of a transnational gas boom and gas 'nationalization' in Bolivia (and in the Guarani region) sparked my current and ongoing work following indigenous territorial politics, socio-environmental dislocations, and the politics of natural gas in Bolivia. This work traces linkages between Bolivia and Brazil (the main consumer of Bolivian gas), offering a trans-regional ethnography of energy resource flows. Conceptually, I am attempting to rescale anthropology and reposition our questions about states, development, and global flows from the perspective of the rising Global South.  As part of this research interest, I also write and teach on the geocultural politics of fossil fuels around the world and here in the United States.

    Along with various articles, some initial ideas appear in Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil, edited by Andrea Behrends, Stephen P Reyna, and Günther Schlee (2012, Bergahn) and in a volume edited by John McNeish and Owen Logan, Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas (2012, London:Pluto).   Nicole Fabricant and I have also edited a recent collection of work on the politics of indigeneity, resources, and territory in Bolivia: Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Rights and Territory in a Plurinational State, (2012, SAR Press).  Brazilian colleagues have published some of my work on the politics of regionalism, in Região e Poder, edited by Dilamar Candida Martins, Izabel Missagio de Mattos, and Mauro Victoria Soares (Goiania:PUC).

The St. Louis Schools Project

   I am also currently working on a book about the cultural politics of school reform in St. Louis.  This work - in the genre of public and engaged anthropology – examines public debate and conflict over the restructuring of school governance and local democracy in the context of urban and regional development agendas and the national struggle over public education. Together with student videographers & ethnographers, and community members, we are documenting the ongoing process of public school 'reform' in St Louis.  We refer to this collaborative and engaged work as the "St. Louis Schools Project."  

Graduate Student Work

    My graduate students  work on social movements and alternative media production in Mexico (Livia Hinegardner) and on language, literacy, and the production of memory in Guatemala (Doc Billingsley).