My academic interest is exploring, ethnographically, the ways in which minerals and peoples come to relate to one another over time. My doctoral research investigated the realities, contradictions, and trajectories of resource-making in the highlands of Peru. Tracing projects of social becoming for individuals and communities on the margins of the Bambas copper mine, the project highlights the everyday struggle for a ‘better life’ amidst the challenging limitations of industrial production.

Currently, as a Leverhulme and Isaac Newton Trust Postdoctoral fellow, I am embarking on a new research programme in the eastern Amazon of Brazil entitled ‘When Gold Enters the Blood’. This project homes in on the lives and labour of garimpeiros (wildcat miners) and the personal histories and existential imperatives which inform their pursuit of gold. When Gold Enters the Blood explores the ways in which wandering amidst the Tapajós valley is as much about making a life as making a living. In elucidating how suffering and faith structure garimpeiro relations to minerals in the rainforest, it recasts informal livelihoods as projects of being with consequences for contemporary conservation politics.