RESEARCH SEMINAR: Stine Krøijer

Speaker: Stine Krøijer, co-author: Cari Tusing

Title: In the eyes of sattellites: fire and political alterity in Brazil

Abstract: Based on fieldwork at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias (INPE), and among public institutions, farmer associations and NGOs in Brazil, our paper describes the uses of remote sensing imagery in the monitoring and development of policies about forest fires. At INPE, scientists translate the visual data received from satellites into maps of fire hotspots and statistics that describe the number of fires and rate of deforestation in the Amazon. Like indigenous theories that describe fire as a technique to transform the landscape that must be controlled, the data practices at INPE create a bounded class of phenomena – forest fires – that become the object of policy development, national and international strategies of combat and containment. By tracing fires through different policy worlds, the paper shows how opposed political factions mobilize around fires. We develop the concept of political alterity to describe the ontological disagreements involved in rendering forest fires a bounded phenomenon, and their relation to the proliferation of enmity and radical otherness in a country already haunted by political polarization. In this sense, fire is not only a metaphor to describe political life, but they hold real consequences for the form politics takes.

Bios
Stine Krøijer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She has a broad interest in climate politics, nature and political activism in Latin America and Northern Europe, and has worked with performative aspects of protests, time and political cosmology among climate activists, anarchists and among indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She is PI of the research project ‘Fire and Political Alterity in Amazonia’, conducting research on agro-industry and remote sensing in the Amazon basin. She is the author of Figurations of the future: forms and temporalities of left radical politics in Northern Europe and co-editor of Grøn Samfundsteori: tanker til en økologisk krisetid.

Cari Tusing is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, and Assistant Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Her research focuses on economics and political ecology from an ethnographic perspective, seeking to understand how inequality and territorial reorganization are experienced through everyday life and food. She has researched the impact of land titling in Paraguay, material practices and food webs and is part of and is part of the research project ‘Fire and Political Alterity in Amazonia’.