Staff profile

Please see also my personal webpage penelopeanthias.com.

My research examines struggles around indigeneity, territory and the politics of resource extraction in Latin America. This work is grounded in a decade and a half of engaged ethnographic research in Bolivia’s Chaco region.

My work is theoretically heterodox and interdisciplinary, drawing inspiration from anti-colonial, Marxist and Foucaultian traditions to offer an empirically-grounded account of how colonial relations are reproduced and contested at resource frontiers, and in struggles over land and property. I have contributed to debates in political ecology, postcolonial geographies, legal geography, anthropology of development, and critical agrarian studies, among others.

At the heart of my approach is a commitment to centring the voices of Indigenous peoples and other racialised rural populations, not only as sources of empirical knowledge but as producers of geographical theory. This has led me to methodological experimentation, combining long-term ethnography with participatory methods, counter-mapping and, most recently, documentary film-making.

My first book, Limits to Decolonization, examines the dynamics and legacies of Bolivia’s Native Community Lands (TCOs) in the gas-rich Chaco region. The book offers a critical ethnographic reflection on the possibilities and limits of maps and law as instruments of decolonisation, as well as providing a novel perspective on the Bolivian "process of change" that centres Indigenous struggles for territory. I argue that the "limits to decolonization" in a context of deepening extractivism shaped new visions of Indigenous autonomy and "hydrocarbon citizenship". The book was awarded the 2019 APSA Award for Best Book in Race, Ethnicity and Comparative Politics and featured in this 2019 Human Geography book review forum. A Spanish translation of the book (Plural Editores, 2022) is available here. Media coverage of recent book launch events in Bolivia and recordings of presentations can be found on this page.

I further developed my analytic of hydrocarbon citizenship through through an institutional ethnography of a new Autonomous Regional Government in Gran Chaco Province, which reveals how plurinationalism and extractivism are articulated in contemporary processes of state-formation in Bolivia. This formed part of the ERC-funded project "Rule and Rupture" (2016-2019) based at the University of Copenhagen. 

I am currently enjoying a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (Sept 2024-Sept 2025), which supports the completion of a book manuscript and second documentary on an ongoing conflict over new natural gas development in the Tariquia National Reserve of Flora and Fauna. My research focuses on neoextractivist territorialising practices (relating to law, cartography, instituions, knowledge, and affect) and how these are contested though activist countertopographies. 

From 2019-2023, I was a co-Investigator on the research project "LEAKS: Extractive enclaves and unintended flows in Latin America" (Independent Research Fund of Denmark), based at the University of Copenhagen. As part of this project I directed and producted a 29-min open-access documentary Don't Touch Tariquia, which shines a light on rural women's resistance to extraction in one area of the national park. In 2023, I gained a Diploma in Creative Documentary Film-making at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television in Cuba, where I made a film about struggles over housing in a nearby "textile village". 

Before joining Durham in 2018, I held research fellowships at the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley. I completed my PhD in Geography at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD students, particularly those with research interests in (post)colonial geographies and/or land and resource politics.

Publications

During ongoing work on the Durham University website, the most up-to-date list of my publications can be found here.

PhD students (completed)

Tim May

Authored book

• Anthias, P. (2022). Límites a la descolonización: Territorios indígenas y política de hidrocarburos en el Chaco boliviano. (Translation by Hernando Calla Ortega). Plural Editores (La Paz)
• Anthias, P. (2018). Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco. Cornell University Press

Chapter in book

• Anthias, P. (2023). Mapping the subaltern. In A. J. Kent, & D. Specht (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Geospatial Technologies and Society. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367855765-11
• Anthias, P. (2012). Regulación ambiental de los hidrocarburos en el Campo Margarita, Tarija. In P. Peralta, & P. Hollenstein (Eds.), Jamás Tan Cerca Arremetió lo Lejos: Inversiones Extraterritoriales, Crisis Ambiental, y Acción Colectiva en América Latina (51-88). Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar
• Anthias, P. (2012). Territorializing Resource Conflicts in “Post-Neoliberal” Bolivia: Hydrocarbon Development and Indigenous Land Titling in TCO Itika Guasu. In H. Haarstad (Ed.), New Political Spaces in Latin American Natural Resource Governance (129-153). (Studies of the Americas). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137073723_7

Edited book

• Anthias, P., & López Flores, P. C. (Eds.). (2023). Neoextractivism and Territorial Disputes in Latin America: Social-ecological Conflict and Resistance on the Front Lines. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003267461

Journal Article

• Anthias, P., & Asher, K. (online). Indigenous Natures and the Anthropocene: Racial Capitalism, Violent Materialities, and the Colonial Politics of Representation. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.13078
• Anthias, P. (2024). Cuts, Flows, and Leaks: Enclaving Practices and Countertopographies at Bolivia's Hydrocarbon-Conservation Frontier / Cortes, flujos y fugas: prácticas de enclavamiento y contratopografías en la frontera hidrocarburosconservación de Bolivia. Journal of Latin American Geography, 23(3), 138-166. https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2024.a948099
• Anthias, P. (2023). Countertopographies and the futures of geographical thought. Dialogues in Human Geography, 14(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231171202
• Anthias, P. (2022). The Pluri-Extractivist State: Regional Autonomy and the Limits of Indigenous Participation in Gran Chaco Province. Journal of Latin American Studies, 54(1), 125-154. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022216x21000997
• Anthias, P., & Hoffmann, K. (2021). The making of ethnic territories: Governmentality and counter-conducts. Geoforum, 119, 218-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.06.027
• Anthias, P. (2021). Rethinking territory and property in indigenous land claims. Geoforum, 119, 268-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.09.008
• Correia, J. E., McEwan, C., Bryan, J., & Anthias, P. (2019). Book Review: Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco. Human geography, 12(3), 57-58. https://doi.org/10.1177/194277861901200301
• Anthias, P. (2019). Ambivalent cartographies: exploring the legacies of indigenous land titling through participatory mapping. Critique of Anthropology, 39(2), 222-242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x19842920
• Anthias, P. (2018). Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco. Latin American Perspectives, 45(5), 136-153. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582x16678804
• Anthias, P. (2017). Ch’ixi landscapes: Indigeneity and capitalism in the Bolivian Chaco. Geoforum, 82, 268-275. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.09.013
• Anthias, P., & Radcliffe, S. A. (2015). The ethno-environmental fix and its limits: Indigenous land titling and the production of not-quite-neoliberal natures in Bolivia. Geoforum, 64, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.06.007

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Anthias, P. TARIQUÍA NO SE TOCA! La resistencia de Chiquiacá https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3SbF-nGZbI
• Anthias, P. (2023). La casa nueva (documentary directed, produced and filmed by Penelope Anthias, 2023) https://vimeo.com/799120385

Other (Print)

• Rocha, N., & Anthias, P. (online). Límites a la descolonización
• Escobar, A., & Anthias, P. La mirada oblicua de Penelope
• Anthias, P. (2016). Indigenous autonomy in the age of extraction