Overview
David Rojas is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American Studies Program at Bucknell University. Since 2009 he has pursued multi-sited ethnographic research in Brazilian Amazonia and United Nations Environmental Forums in collaboration with smallholder farmers and environmental scientists who are involved in emerging climate policy approaches. He studies how his collaborators, peasants and scientists who live and work immersed in mass-scale ecological devastation, struggle to establish novel relations between humans and nonhumans in an effort to endure increasingly inhospitable environments. A cultural anthropologist by training, he is interested in creativity amidst widespread destruction, generosity in times of mass extinction, and hope for the future in anticipation of impending ruin. For his more recent research he has joined forces with a grassroots peasant organization which gathers Amazonian smallholders who seek to make their family farms into settings in which humans and nonhumans may transform environmental wreckage into spaces of ecological recomposition. Results of his work have been published in Geoforum, Political and Legal Anthropology Review—PoLAR and the edited volume Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, among others.
Research Focus
Climate Architectures: On the Becomings of Scientific Authority in Agro-Industrial Amazonia
What becomes of scientific authority when industrial landscapes—which scientists have shown could destroy untold numbers of humans and non-humans alike—continue to expand? Is this the end of scientific authority or a limit at which it is transformed? I engage with these questions while advancing the work of philosophers, architectural theorists, and anthropologists who study the actions of scientists who seek to remake ruined ecologies into unnatural but livable spaces. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out since 2009 in an area of Amazonia in which native ecologies have been replaced by industrial, monoculture plantations. In this location, I worked with Brazilian scientists who have directly experienced the destructive effects of agro-industrial expansion: violence against forest populations, mass-scale deforestation, and, more recently, runaway ecological dislocations (including increasingly frequent and severe droughts, fires, and floods). In this context, scientists have persuaded agro-industrial farmers and peasants to transform parts of their farms into open-air experiments in which both scientists and non-scientists currently study—and craft strategies to endure—accelerating ecological destruction. I call the material configurations resulting from these collaborative efforts climate architectures: relational spaces in which persons and groups may modulate their exposure to ecological destruction. Examining climate architectures enables me to reconsider the notion that scientists are recognized as leaders only when they persuade others that, thanks to their knowledge, they can author spaces in which human lives may be sheltered from destruction. In agro-industrial Amazonia, I argue, the authority that landholders and peasants recognize in scientific practice and knowledge is not related to conventional notions of authorship, knowledge, creativity, or interiority. Rather, the scientists with whom I work are seen as authoritative figures due to their willingness to join groups that expose themselves to runaway destruction of a kind that remains exterior to human understanding.