معرفی
Dr. Penelope Fay Anthias is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, specializing in political geography with a focus on indigenous struggles, decolonization, and resource extraction politics in Latin America. Her research is grounded in over 15 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia's Chaco region, particularly with Guarani communities.
Her educational background includes a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge (2014), preceded by research fellowships at the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley. She completed a Diploma in Creative Documentary Film-making at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television in Cuba in 2023, reflecting her interdisciplinary methodological approach.
Anthias's research examines how colonial relations are reproduced and contested at resource frontiers, with theoretical grounding in anti-colonial, Marxist, and Foucaultian traditions. Her work spans political ecology, postcolonial geographies, legal geography, and critical agrarian studies, characterized by methodological innovation combining long-term ethnography with participatory methods, counter-mapping, and documentary filmmaking. Current research focuses on neoextractivist territorializing practices and activist countertopographies in Bolivia's Tariquia National Reserve.
Her publications reveal consistent engagement with themes of indigenous autonomy, hydrocarbon citizenship, and the limitations of decolonization within extractive political economies. The research trajectory shows increasing sophistication in analyzing how plurinationalism and extractivism are articulated in contemporary state formation processes, with recent work expanding into documentary film as both research method and dissemination strategy.
- 2019 APSA Award for Best Book in Race, Ethnicity and Comparative Politics (for Limits to Decolonization)
- British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (Sept 2024-Sept 2025)
- Co-Investigator on "LEAKS: Extractive enclaves and unintended flows in Latin America" (2019-2023)
- ERC-funded project "Rule and Rupture" (2016-2019)
Anthias has supervised PhD students including Tim May, Gelin Wang, and Yuanjing Jiang, with research interests in postcolonial geographies and land/resource politics. Her documentary work, including Don't Touch Tariquia and La casa nueva, demonstrates commitment to collaborative knowledge production that centers indigenous perspectives. Current research examines conflicts over natural gas development in Bolivia's Tariquia National Reserve through the lens of neoextractivist territorializing practices and activist countertopographies.
