Ph.D. candidates Pere Nogues Martin, Julian Ross and Paulo Suarez Roja received a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (of up to $25,000) from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for their doctoral research.
Pere Nogues Martin‘s project is titled “The making of a lithium frontier: Mining, Conflict and Identity in Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat”
Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat contains rich lithium deposits and is the stage of intensifying social conflict. In this twelve-month research, I will investigate (1) the making of a resource frontier, (2) how local people negotiate prospective social and environmental transformations and how these foster identity demands and land claims, and (3) how local communities, together with environmental activists, are producing a kind of environmental knowledge which, not only questions the current mining practices, but also encourages international solidarity networks. My research looks at how lithium governance, which is characterized by uncertainty and deficient scientific knowledge, is intertwined with, and produces, new local notions of resource ownership, territorial belonging, and environmental concerns in ways different from how the extraction of hydrocarbons and other minerals would. This research also proposes alternative ways of engaged production of knowledge in which local communities, activists, and scholars collaborate and set common goals. The premise of my project is that climate change mitigation cannot be achieved through the constant technological revolution on which financial and industrial capitalism depends, but from activist opposition to extractivism and by centering the understandings and experiences of the communities that are most affected by climate change and mining’s ecological destruction.
Julian Ross‘ project is titled “Germany’s New Jewish Question: Race, Secularism, and Religious Difference in Jewish Welfare”
In 1991, in the midst of the Soviet Union’s collapse and Germany’s reunification, German parliament elected to grant some 200,000 Jews from former Soviet republics special “refugee quota” status, assuming this population of mostly skilled and educated workers would integrate with relative ease. Virtually overnight, Germany once again had one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Today, many of Germany’s Jews are poor, dependent on welfare, and still lack German citizenship, with the most extensive Jewish organizations being welfare institutions. Moreover, many Jewish figures and associations are beginning to come into conflict with Germany’s normative liberal politics and its associate notions of religiosity, race, and the secular. This project will ethnographically investigate the ways Jews in Germany configure these politics through the practices of care and reproduction that define much of their communities. My ethnographic investigation will ask how a relational approach to racial capitalism and secularism can help us understand liberalism in a period of European disillusionment.
Paulo Suarez Rojas‘ project is titled “Urban Financialization and Its Others: Housing Dispossession and Tenant Politics in Los Angeles”
Despite living in a city with the most progressive renter protections in the country, tenants in Los Angeles are one of the populations most vulnerable to homelessness in the world. The global expansion of finance into rental markets has generated new landlord-tenant dynamics. Tenants in corporate-owned buildings experience rising landlord harassment, housing neglect, and eviction notices. In L.A., multiple forms of tenant politics have challenged these practices. Yet, tenants not only seek to oppose them but also question and reinterpret the meanings of dispossession. This project asks: what processes of political subjectification shape tenants’ understandings of dispossession, and how do these processes uphold or challenge global regimes of urban financialization? By examining ‘tenant’ as a contested category produced in everyday interactions and mass circulation, my research traces the practices and discourses that produce notions of dispossession across different political spaces. I will conduct twelve months of archival research with media artifacts and anti-eviction data, as well as ethnographic research in corporate-owned buildings and with tenant advocacy organizations in L.A. This project expands scholarship on housing financialization by shedding light on new struggles against urban finance and scholarship on tenant relations by situating them within changing discourses of dispossession.
