Eduardo Romero Dianderas

I am a Peruvian anthropologist interested in the histories, politics and emerging futures of tropical rainforests, both in Amazonia and elsewhere. Drawing on science and technology studies, media theory, anthropology, geography and history, I teach and write on topics such as global environmental governance, the politics of technical expertise and the rise of planetary knowledge infrastructures in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss.

My current book manuscript, Calculating Amazonia: the politics of calculation in the age of climate change and biodiversity loss, examines how the transformation of tropical rainforest governance in the context of the global environmental crisis is triggering different kinds of political and epistemic controversies around the definition of mundane technical objects such as lines, volumes, points and polygons.

By following the activities of state engineers, land surveyors, Indigenous peoples, loggers and other human and nonhuman actors, Calculating Amazonia traces how the rising planetary push to render tropical rainforests into spaces of calculative transparency and accountability ultimately fuels epistemic and aesthetic struggles over the conditions by which different objects of environmental concern such as tropical timber or Indigenous territories are to be measured, calculated, aggregated and visualized at local and planetary scales.

My work has been funded by the Wenner-Gren’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, the SSRC’s International Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, the NSF’s Cultural Anthropology Program, and the Explorer’s Club’s Exploration Fund Grant.

Currently, I work as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.