Steven Schwartz

Steven Schwartz, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), 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. 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 major project, tentatively titled Vanishing Oil: Infrastructural Ruins and Post-Carbon Futures in Latin America. While discussions on the climate crisis have stressed the planetary unsustainability of fossil fuels, this work 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, and the University of Chicago’s Center for International Social Science Research.

Pronouns: he/him/his