Claudia Grisales, "Aligning the Stars: an Ethnography of Digital Networks and Campesino Struggles in the Colombian Amazon"

In this talk, Claudia Grisales will discuss her dissertation research on the role of digital technologies in struggles for land and recognition of a campesino, or small-farmer, community, in the northwestern Colombian Amazon. While dealing with discontinuities, breakdowns, and exclusions that configure multiple digital divides, campesinos face systems of technological surveillance and management constitutive of national and international arrangements to govern the global environmental crisis. In this talk, she focuses on how technologies of forest governance configure the forest as an asset and campesinos as mere beneficiaries of international cooperation projects. While analyzing the structural and historical aspects underpinning the power differential between the environmental bureaucracy and the campesino community, the talk highlights brief moments of odd connection in which technologies of forest governance are grass-rooted to make new, and perhaps more just, understandings of the forest and its politics possible amid an uncertain landscape.