Steven Schwartz

Affiliations

The Center for Latin American Studies; Institute for Global Sustainability

Areas of Expertise

Extractive capitalism; renewable energy; climate change; infrastructure and ruination; Indigenous environmental politics; indigeneity; borders and (il)licit economies; decoloniality; Colombia and Venezuela

View Professor Schwartz’s Academia profile & CV

About 

Steven Schwartz is an environmental anthropologist whose research explores how the climate crisis and the global rise of renewable energy intersect with Indigenous peoples’ environmental relations, practices of resistance, and political and economic life in Latin America. Dr. Schwartz is developing his first book project, provisionally titled Wind Futures: Indigeneity, Aerial Worlds, and the Making of Renewable Energy in Colombia. This ethnography traces the multifaceted ways in which Indigenous Wayuu communities, energy experts, and state bureaucrats experience, negotiate, and shape the shift from fossil fuels to renewables in La Guajira– a coastal region in northeast Colombia and one of the windiest places on the continent. The manuscript shows the emergence of a form of “green” and racialized extractivism that recruits and transforms indigeneity as a crucial scaffold for wind power production and capital accumulation, as well as the multiple contestations it gives rise to. This work bridges debates in environmental and political anthropology, political ecology, science and technology studies, and Indigenous and Latin American studies.

Dr. Schwartz is also working on a second book project, tentatively titled Vanishing Oil: Infrastructural Ruins and Post-Carbon Futures in Latin America. This project examines the material, affective, and political reconfigurations that arise in extractive geographies when oil disappears. While discussions on the climate crisis have stressed the planetary unsustainability of fossil fuels, Vanishing Oil investigates what ideas, practices, and imaginaries of environmental care, post-carbon life, and eco-social justice are emerging among groups living near petrochemical ruins and oil regions in Colombia and Venezuela.

Dr. Schwartz’s writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Economic Anthropology, Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Anthropology News, Istor, and other publications. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren, Tinker, and Mellon Foundations, the University of Chicago’s Center for International Social Science Research, and the Pozen Center for Human Rights, among others. Before joining Boston University in 2024, Dr. Schwartz was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colorado College.

Selected Publications

• 2024. “Dangerous Winds: Criminal Threats and the Indigenized Security of Wind Power in Colombia.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 1-12, https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12731
• 2023. “Wayuu Winds.” Anthropology News 64 (5): 34-37, https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/wayuu-winds/ (co-authored with Weildler Guerra Curvelo)
• 2023. “Co-opted Transitions: Coal, Wind, and the Corporate Politics of Decarbonization in Colombia.” Journal of Political Ecology 30 (1): 652–676, https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.5470 (co-authored with Emma
  Banks)
• 2021. “Wind Extraction? Gifts, Reciprocity, and Renewability in Colombia’s Energy Frontier.” Economic Anthropology 8 (1): 116-132, https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12192
• 2021 “The Politics of Bachaqueo: Gasoline Black Markets and Indigeneity in Venezuela.” American Ethnologist 48 (4): 504-519, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13036 (article prize winner of the 2022
  McCay Junior Scholar Award, Anthropology & Environment Society, American Anthropological Association)

All of Dr. Schwartz’s publications can be downloaded at: https://bu.academia.edu/StevenSchwartz

Courses

• CAS AN 101 Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
• CAS AN 362 Culture & Environment