When
Virtual Charlas con Café:
Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/577061924
In 2012, a group of Catholic environmental scientists completed six years of longitudinal research on heavy metal contamination caused by mining in Peru’s Mantaro Valley in the Central Andes. This Catholic scientific project formed in relation to national opposition to environmentalism, a powerful mining industry, political corruption and violence, and pervasive suspicion about scientific objectivity. Out of this tense political climate, an alliance between transnational and local Christian organizations, scientific practitioners and institutions, and the region’s Archbishop managed to generate the first “objective” scientific study of heavy metal contamination in the region. This lecture analyzes the hard-fought achievements of this alliance, while also reflecting on the ongoing limits of science-based environmental activism within globalized economic systems of resource extraction.
About the Speaker: Dr. Stefanie Graeter is currently a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine in the Department of Anthropology and an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Arizona (Fall 2020). Her current book project, Mineral Incorporations, examines lead toxicity science and the politics of extractive economics in contemporary Peru. Dr. Graeter's peer-reviewed articles are published in Cultural Anthropology and American Anthropologist. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis with a designated emphasis in critical theory. Previously, she taught Latin American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Chicago (2017-2019) and held the Science in Human Culture postdoc at Northwestern University (2015-2017).