Research Staff
Anthony Bebbington (Director)
Tony is Professor of Nature, Society and Development at the School of Environment and Development in the University of Manchester , and ESRC Professorial Research Fellow (2007-2009). His research has focused on rural development, poverty and environmental change, and on the roles of nongovernmental organizations and indigenous people’s movements in Latin American development. It has been funded by the Ford Foundation (USA), World Bank, Association of American Geographers (USA), the Inter-American Foundation (USA), Economic and Social Research Council (UK), International Development Research Centre (Canada), and the Governments of the UK, Holland, Sweden and Finland. He has advised nongovernmental organizations in Europe, Latin America and North America, as well as organizations of the United Nations, and sits on the editorial boards and advisory boards of four academic journals.
Leonith Hinojosa (Researcher)
Leonith is Research and Teaching Fellow at the School of Environment and Development in the University of Manchester . She studies local and regional processes of economic change in Andean countries, centred around the economic and institutional dimensions of rural and territorial development strategies, and on the roles of nongovernmental organizations in rural development. Her recent work has focused on market formation in rural areas and its effects on peasants’ livelihoods. She has worked with development organizations on project formulation, monitoring and evaluation, and also in managerial roles.
Mara Luisa Burneo (Researcher)
María Luisa completed her Master's degree in Social Anthropology and Ethnology in L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2003). She has worked professionally for various rural development NGOs in Peru, with a particular emphasis on work with farmer organizations and peasant communities in the coastal and highland regions. Her research interests focus on dynamics of change in rural societies, in particular as they relate to territory, land tenure and agrarian structure. Since 2004 she has been coordinating projects across Peru that aim to strengthen decentralization processes, administrative practices in sub-national governments and mechanisms for public accountability. In TCD-Andes she works as a researcher based in the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Lima. She is also part of the Asociación Servicios Educativos Rurales (SER), Perú, where she is a specialist in the programme on Decentralization and Democratic Governance. She is also a part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Peru (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú).
Associated PhD Students
Jorge Alberto Castro Hernández
Jorge is a PhD student in Development Policy and Management at the School of Environment and Development in the University of Manchester. He has BAs in Philosophy (1996) and Theology (2000) and a Masters in Economics (2005). In addition to social and pastoral work, between 1996 and 1998 he served with the Jesuit Refugee Service, an international and religious organization that works with refugees, migrants and internally displaced people. There he supported internally displaced people and researched the problem of internal displacement in Colombia. From 2000 to 2001 he worked in the Program for Development and Peace in Magdalena Medio (PDPMM) in Colombia. He is now conducting research on rural territorial development, armed conflict and peace in the Magdalena Medio (Colombia) supervised by Tony Bebbington and co-supervised by Phil Woodhouse. The aim of the research is to provide a critical understanding of a Territorial Rural Development (TRD) intervention in a context of armed conflict, by looking at the case of the Project for Development and Peace in Magdalena Medio - PDPMM.
Denise Humphreys Bebbington
Denise is a PhD student in Development Policy and Management at the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. She has a BA in History (1981) from the University of California, Berkeley and a Msc in Development Management (1986) from The American University. Over her career she has worked with a range of NGOs and Foundations, including Catholic Relief Services, the Inter-American Foundation and the Global Greengrants Fund, on issues of community development, rural development, human rights, and environmental justice. More recently her research interests have centered on the expansion of extractive industry and infrastructure development in South America and the responses of social-environmental movement organizations to this development. Here research addresses the political ecology of natural gas extraction in Tarija, Bolivia and is supervised by Diana Mitlin and Gavin Bridge.
Ximena S Warnaars
Ximena is a PhD student in Development Policy and Management at the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester. She has her BA and MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands (2001). Ximena worked for NGO?s in Utrecht, New York City and in Peru on issues of human rights, indigenous people, environmental justice, gender and theatre for development. In Peru, her work focused on oil and gas conflicts with indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and mining conflicts with campesino and indigenous communities in the Andes region. She also was lecturer in the Amazonian Studies Masters Program at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru (2005-2006). While working in Peru, Ximena became a member and editor of the Mines and Communities Network where she continues to have an active role. Her current research interests are on indigenous identity, social movements, mining conflicts, communication and community development and she is being supervised by Tony Bebbington and co-supervised by Penny Harvey. Within TCD-Andes, Ximena is working as a general research assistant as well as conducting her own research on the relations between mining, conflicts and territorially based development in the south-eastern Oriente of Ecuador.
Jennifer Moore is a Canadian freelance print and broadcast journalist currently based in Cuenca, Ecuador and a member of the Foreign Press Association of Ecuador. For two years, she has been accompanying the anti-mining movement in Ecuador while investigating the role of Canadian-financed transnational mining companies and producing news articles and radio documentaries for the alternative press including Free Speech Radio News and upsidedownworld.org. During this time, she has also corresponded for the Green Planet Monitor and collaborated with the Ecumenical Human Rights Commission and the Latin American Information Agency in Quito. She has previous work experience as Program Coordinator for a community radio station and as Co-Producer of a series of social history television documentaries. Her radio documentaries have been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Rabble Radio, and the Women's International News Gathering Service. She has a BSc in Biological Sciences (1995) from the University of Guelph.
For all Jennifer's articles on mining in Ecuador, click here.
Teresa Velásquez is completing a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a BA in International Relations (1999), and a MA in Anthropology (2006). She is currently conducting field research in the southern highlands of Ecuador. Her research examines how a proposed transnational gold mine project and state interventions in the mineral sector are animating and transforming historical inequalities among campesino communities and their access to water sources. Her work challenges orthodox notions of the state’s complicity in neoliberal economic and social projects to understand how local communities are shaping and being shaped by new ‘left’ state discourses and practices. Teresa’s research builds upon eight years of engagement with human and indigenous rights issues in Ecuador. Her research interests include social movements, natural resource politics, the state, gender, and race/ethnicity, and activist research methodologies. In 2007-2008, Teresa Velásquez was awarded the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship. She is also a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (2009), and is a research affiliate of the Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencas Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador.
"Linked SSRC-ESRC fellows"
Two SSRC-ESRC Fellowships have been awarded to enable links between
the project and US-based researchers working on similar topics. The
first fellowship was given to Dr. Jeffrey Bury of Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who has collaborated with the project during 2007-8. The second has been awarded to Dr. Stuart Kirsch, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan who will collaborate with project activities during 2009.