Institute of International Studies; University of California, Berkeley
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Visiting Scholars and Fellows |
Please download Professor Depelchin's CV.
Dr. Erazo’s research examines the indigenous autonomy movement in the Ecuadorian Amazon and how it has interacted with a changing spectrum of development projects sponsored by both national and international organizations over the past three decades. She directs particular attention toward governance practices and land use in a large indigenous cooperative, which has been the target of several development projects spanning from cattle ranching to ecotourism. Erazo recently completed an interdepartmental Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology and School of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan. She has contributed to group-authored articles published in the Journal of Political Ecology and Conservation Biology, and to the forthcoming book Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics. She can be reached by email at jerazo at uclink.berkeley.edu or by phone at 510/643-4507.
Ike Okonta is co-author of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil in the Niger Delta (Sierra Club Books, 2001). As a journalist and political campaigner he worked closely with Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists before the Ogoni leader was hung in 1995. Okonta obtained his doctorate in Politics at the University of Oxford in June 2002. His current area of interest is nationalism(s) and identity politics in Nigeria, and the role of petroviolence in the reshaping of political order in the oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta. Ike Okonta advises several human rights, political, and environmental groups in Nigeria, among them Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) and Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria (ERA/FoE.). He can be reached via email at igokonta at uclink.berkeley.edu.
Karen Hoffman's research is on the putting into practice of toxic pollutant and toxic substances control laws. Starting with current popularity of and advocacy for "precaution," or erring on the side of safety rather than harm when there is uncertainty, she observes that notions of precaution were written into toxics laws in the early- and mid-1970s and inquires into what got in the way of putting precaution in the implementation. Hoffman completed her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her dissertation is an ethnography of pollution prevention activists working in the context of the environmental justice movement in a metropolitan area of the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is author of "Permitting Poison: Public Participation, the Criteria for Action, and Environmental Justice in the Case of Dioxin," an essay in the book Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life (Routledge 2003).
Jake Kosek received a Doctorate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley (2002) and a Masters Degree at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (1995). After receiving his doctorate, he held the Lang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University and was also a Lecturer there in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. He is now Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at the University of New Mexico and is currently on leave as a Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley. He is co-author of the recently published edited volume entitled Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke 2003) and has written extensively on questions of nature, culture and politics in the US and abroad. His book Understories: The Political Life of Forests in northern New Mexico (Duke University Press, forthcoming) explores the cultural politics of nature, race and nation amidst violent struggles over forest resources in northern New Mexico. His current research takes a close look at the discourses of a critical natural history, through an exploration of the culture and politics of bees. By attending to there characteristics and tendencies he explores how beekeeping has helped remake discourses of modern citizenship and populations and served as archetype and archive for the formation and reproduction not only of social taxonomies and hierarchies but also concomitant political erasures and possibilities.
Dr. Wirpsa's research examines a rise in conflict between two global regime networks in the international system a hegemonic one structured to deepen the incorporation of Latin American countries into the global market economy through the extraction of natural resources, and a counter-hegemonic one grounded in the defense of indigenous and environmental rights. She explores not only an increase of this category of resource conflict, through and in-depth case study of the resistance of the U'wa people of Colombia to oil development by state and multinational firms, but also shifts in the arenas in which conflict, arbitration, mediation and/or stalemate occur through globalization processes. Dr. Wirpsa received her Ph.D. from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California in 2004. Her work is informed by a decade of experience as a journalist in Latin America, based in Colombia, with a focus on human rights, globalization processes, indigenous issues and internal displacement. It is also shaped by close work with transnational indigenous, environmental and human rights networks focused on Colombia, working on legal advocacy, U.S. policy and indigenous community development. Her co-authored article, "Oil and the Political Economy of Conflict in Colombia and Beyond: A Linkages Approach," was recently published in a special edition on the geopolitics of war and natural resources in the journal Geopolitics.
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