Andrea Sempértegui

Andrea Sempértegui is an Assistant Professor of Politics and a Paul Garrett Fellow at Whitman College. She teaches and writes on Indigenous politics, environmental and feminist movements, conflicts over territory and natural resource extraction, and decolonial thought in Latin America. Her publications in English and Spanish include peer-reviewed articles for Politics and Gender (2019), Journal of International Women’s Studies (2020), Antropologías del Sur (2022), Society & Natural Resources (2023), and Studies in Social Justice (2023). She has written essays and book reviews for The New York Review of Books, Alternautas, Verso and NACLA. She is co-editor of a translated book by the Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Eine Reflexion über Praktiken und Diskurse der Dekolonisierung (Unrast Verlag, 2018).

She has recently been awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her book manuscript, Today, I Dreamt What Will Happen Tomorrow: Indigenous Women, Extractive Capital, and Forest Politics in Ecuador (under contract with University of Florida Press). This book follows the territorial struggle of the Mujeres Amazónicas, a group of Indigenous women leaders who have organized against oil and mining projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Previously, she was a Visitor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a Member at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen, Germany, a Visiting Researcher at Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador, and a Visiting Researcher at UC Davis. From 2020 to 2021 she was a Visiting Instructor of Anthropology and Sociology and of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen in Germany in 2021.

Indigenous politics, environmental and feminist movements, struggles over territory and natural resource extraction, and decolonial thought in Latin America

Ph.D. Sociology
Justus Liebig University, Giessen (Germany)
September 2021

M.A. Political Theory
J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
September 2015

B.A. Political Science
Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich (Germany)
July 2012

Edited Books

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Eine Reflexion über Praktiken und Diskurse der Dekolonisierung, edited by Sebastian Garbe, María Cárdenas and Andrea Sempértegui (Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2018). [Link]

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

„Das Weben des Spinnennetzes: Mujeres Amazónicas und das Design anti-extraktiver Politik in Ecuador,“ Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte (accepted and forthcoming).

“Ontological Conflicts in the Plurinational State: The Case of Indigenous Resistance against the Mirador Mega-Mining Project in Ecuador,” co-authored with Michelle Báez, Society & Natural Resources, 1-18 (2023). [Link]

“Weaving the Spiderweb: Mujeres Amazónicas and the Design of Anti-Extractive Politics in Ecuador,” Studies in Social Justice, Special Issue “Women in Movement and Feminisms: Critical Materialisms and Environmentalisms,” 17(2), 204-221 (2023). [Link]

“La Selva Viviente como Selva Política: Prácticas de Hacer-Selva en la Lucha de las Mujeres Amazónicas en Ecuador,” Antropologías del Sur, Dossier Temático “Transformaciones Locales para un Cambio Global” (2022). [Link]

“Decolonizing the Anti-Extractive Struggle: Amazonian Women’s Practices of Forest-Making in Ecuador,” Journal of International Women’s Studies, Special Issue “In Medias Res: Decolonial Interventions,” 21(7), 118-134 (2020). [Link]

“Indigenous Women’s Activism, Ecofeminism, and Extractivism: Partial Connections in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Politics and Gender, 1-28 (2019). [Link]

Book Chapters

“Extractivism, Anti-Extractivism, and Post-Extractivism,” The Modern World after Colonialism. Remaking the Social Sciences, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Ipek Demir, Paul Robert Gilbert, Su-ming Khoo and Lucy Mayblin. Bristol: Bristol University Press (forthcoming).

"Subsidios y Moratorias: Cómo Avanzar Hacia un Ecologismo Popular,” co-authored with Geografía Crítica Ecuador, Comunálisis and YASunidxs. Levantamientos, Insurrecciones y Paros. Dinámica de la Disputa Social en Ecuador, edited by Alejandra Santillana, Stalin Herrera and Esteban Daza. CLACSO: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (2024).

“Sustaining the Struggle, Taking Over the Space: Amazonian Women and the Indigenous Movement in Ecuador,” The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Race and Gender, edited by Shirley-Anne Tate and Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2022). [Link]

Other Publications

“Fighting the Planetary Mine: The Frente Nacional Anti-Minero in Ecuador,” Property Will Cost Us the Earth. Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, Verso Reports series, introduced by Andreas Malm and edited by Jessie Kindig. London: Verso Books (2022). [Link]

“La Defensa Territorial más allá de la Resistencia: Mujeres Amazónicas Tejiendo Rexistencia en Ecuador,” Etnicidades en disputa: nuevos caminos, nuevos desafíos, edited by Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Sebastian Garbe, Andrea Silva-Tapia, Andrea Sempértegui and María Cárdenas. Revista Iberoamericana 20(75), 227-232 (2020). [Link]

“Reflexionen über die Minga aus den Anden: Praktiken der Partizipation in Gemeinschaft,” co-authored with Kuymi Tambaco, Wissenschaft und Frieden (W&F) (2019). [Link]

“Diálogos de (Re)existencia Indígena Afro-Latinxs: Descolonialidades Posibles,” co-authored with Katucha Bento, Heriberto Ruiz Ponce and Louis Di Paolo, Altenautas.net (2019). [Link] [English Version]

Book Reviews

Review of Sebastian Garbe, Weaving Solidarity. Decolonial Perspectives on Transnational Advocacy of and with the Mapuche (Transcript Verlag, 2022), Alternautas 9 (1) (2022). [Link]

Review of Teresa Velásquez, Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Ecuador (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2022), NACLA (2022). [Link]

Review of Silvia Federici, Revolución en Punto Cero. Trabajo Doméstico, Reproducción y Luchas Feministas (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2013), Argumenta Philosophica Vol. 2 (2018).

“Cosmopolitics among Entangled Worlds: Indigenous Politics in the Highlands of Peru,” Review of Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), KULT_online 50 (2017). [Link]

Blog Posts and Journalistic Publications

“Ecuador’s Historic Strike,” The New York Review of Books (October, 2022). [Link]

“La Fiebre de Oro Supera la Fiebre de Covid-19,” co-authored with Romano Paganini, Mutantia.ch (May, 2020). [Link] [German Version]

“Ecuador: Covid-19, Temblor y Abismos,” Latin American Perspectives Blog (April, 2020). [Link]

“La Violencia, de la Cual no se Habla,” Mutantia.ch (October, 2019). [Link] [German Version]

Translations

Frente Nacional Anti-Minero, “We Are of the Earth—A Manifesto,” in Property Will Cost Us the Earth. Direct Action and the Future of the Global Climate Movement, Verso Reports series, introduced by Andreas Malm and edited by Jessie Kindig. London: Verso Books (2022).

Verónica Gago, “Mutant Neoliberalism, Originary Violence and Feminist Revolts in Latin America” (translated by William Callison and Andrea Sempértegui), Law and Political Economy Blog, Symposium on the Book Mutant Neoliberalism Market Rule and Political Ruptures (2020).

2024 Social Actions Initiative Award from Sociologists for Women in Society (on behalf of Comunálisis)

2022 Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (JLU) Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences

2022 Second Place in the German Latin America Research Association (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutsche Lateinamerikaforschung - ADLAF) Dissertation Awards