My doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Cambridge, was concerned with utopianism, cooperative development, and missionary practices in the central Ecuadorian Andes.  In it, I deployed utopianism as a trope to explore emergent conceptualisations of transformation and possibility in the highland parish of Salinas, the site of a much-vaunted micro-industrial cooperative movement that was initiated after the arrival of Salesian missionaries in 1971.  

By contrast with accounts that construe modernity in terms of the impetus towards teleology and order, positing ambivalence and hybridisation as their unintended and objectionable side-effects, I suggested that Salinero development was envisaged not as a planned progression towards static, single-faceted goals, but rather as an organic, experimental, unfolding movement that celebrated uncertainty, in-betweenness, and the fusion of distinct practices. The ambivalent, mimetic, and hybrid modalities of Salinero knowledge practices variously troubled, muddied, and traversed the kinds of frontiers between human and non-human, real and representation, subject and object, secular and divine, knowledge and practice that tend to figure in accounts of western modernity. I aligned these material and conceptual border-crossings, the emergent, unresolved blurrings and tensions between poles, with More’s rich concept of Utopia, denoting “the ‘other’ of any place” (Marin 1993: 411); mobile things, like missionaries, products, and emergent ideas, are in-between, not fixed in any place, imbued with the multiple possibilities of what they might become. Salinero utopianism, I suggested, was evoked through this mobile work of becoming more than one thing, whilst being neither one thing nor another.  I explored these utopian border practices as they coalesced around the nexus of the Salesian Mission and its combative other, the Parish Council. Throughout the thesis, I followed the unfolding, intersecting trails of Salinero development, exploring how production, charisma, spirituality, cheese, travel, race, and the state were constituted in contingent relation to one another.

Following up on one wing of my doctoral research, I am currently interested in addressing the novel possibilities for re-thinking the state presented by the study of recent trends towards (re)constituting and strengthening decentralised forms of government in the Andes. I now join CRESC as a postdoctoral researcher working on the project, “Scale, Ambiguity and Experimentation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Regional Government in Peru”, directed by Professor Penny Harvey and Professor Deborah Poole. Broadly, the project will be exploring how the layered and ambiguous knowledge practices coalescing around the recently formed Regional Government of Cusco are working to rearticulate understandings of the nation-state.