Curriculum Vitae: Dr.

Rosalyn Bold

Contact: r.bold@ucl.ac.uk

CURRENT POSITION

2021-24 ESRC Research Fellow and PI Project: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate

Change. Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, Department of
Anthropology, University College London.

EDUCATION

2010-2016 PhD Social Anthropology (part-time), University of Manchester.

Thesis: Landscapes of Alterity: Climate change in Contemporary Bolivia
2007-2008 MPhil in Social Anthropology, London School of Economics
2005-2006 MA Latin American Studies, University Liverpool.
Thesis: Revolutionary Education in Mexico.
2001-2004 BA Archaeology and Anthropology (Social Anthropology).
Girton College, Cambridge University.

PUBLICATIONS

2021. ‘The Recursive Indian: The Significance of Complementary Ethnic Alterity in the Bolivian
Tipnis March’. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 40 (3).

This article explores ethnic alterity in the Bolivian Tipnis crisis, showing how claiming
indigenous, Indian and colonial identities was significant in shaping government
strategy and responses among ‘citified Indians’ of La Paz and El Alto and highland
indigenous social movements. While Kuper claims indigeneity can distract attention
from ‘real local issues’, Andean ethnicity is relational, roles assigned and reassigned
in a continually shifting political theatre, where the ‘rebel Indian’ recurs historically,
challenging colonial hegemony and reorienting the discussion towards issues of
territorial autonomy.

2020. ‘Constructing cosmoscapes: cosmological currents in conversation and contestation in

contemporary Bolivia’. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10 (1): 195–208

This article explores how cosmological currents contest and converse with one another
to compose a shifting 'cosmoscape' in Kaata, a highland Bolivian community, and at the
national level. The community is experiencing transformation from a world founded in
reciprocal relations between humans and animate mountain 'earth beings' towards an
anthropocene where non-humans comprise 'natural resources' for human exploitation.
Challenging an easy contrast between modernity and animism as reified 'ontologies', I
explore the community as a cosmoscape composed of conversations between
contrasting cosmological trends; mountain beings are themselves the result of
cosmopolitical negotiations with the colonial modern state rather than timeless
constructs. In the wider state-level cosmoscape in which the community sits, social
movements contest the tokenistic utilisation of 'earth beings' in contemporary indigenist
legislation with an alternative cosmology in which they are capable of retribution, a
vision contesting extractivism, and revealing similar tensions and conversations
between relational and extractive currents.
2020. "On Bolivian Lithium." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, March 24.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/on-bolivian-lithium

Summary: a brief analysis of the revolutionary bid to exploit Bolivia’s lithium by a

German firm affiliated to ACI Systems working with the state, addressing national
demands to reverse the trope of neocolonial, centre-periphery resource extraction. ACI
systems committed to unprecedented levels of investment in local economies, including
a factory for Bolivia to produce and export lithium batteries, and engaging to employ
locals, combined with strong environmental commitments.

2019. ‘Introduction: Constructing A Cosmopolitics of Climate Change’ In The ‘end of the world’?
Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change, edited by Rosalyn Bold. Palgrave Series in the
Anthropology of Sustainability. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-28.

This edited volume constructs a ‘cosmopolitics’ of climate change and temporality,

consulting small-scale Latin American indigenous communities on whether they consider it
constitutes ‘the end of the world’; how worlds might have ended before, or continue to strive
to exist after cataclysmic events. In a context of climate change and extractivism, is there a
way of creating continuity? All the communities consulted conferred that renewing and
revitalising rituals connecting them to the surrounding sacred landscape was crucial, and
several considered that worlds continued to exist in a fragile post-cataclysmic state
following colonialism. Several chapters consider how such worlds come into conversation
with scientific and technocratic perspectives through climate adaptation and mitigation
schemes. By comparing scientific, culturally western, and indigenous accounts of the same
phenomenon, contributors seek to broaden understandings of what climate change
constitutes.

2019. ‘Climate change and Contamination in a relational landscape’. In The ‘end of the world’?
Constructing a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change, edited by Rosalyn Bold. Palgrave Series in the
Anthropology of Sustainability. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 91-11.

This chapter shows how melding worlding practices together can contribute to
understanding, adapting to and mitigating the truly cosmopolitical phenomenon of
climate change. Relational landscapes can be of utility to a modern understanding of
environment and contamination by expanding isolated variables such as waste plastics
or changing temperature into a network of interrelating human and non-human actors.
The concept of scale and inter- relationality present in my fieldsite, Kaata, renders
climate change relevant, locally experienced, and intrinsically related to the actions of
humans within their agentive environments.

2018. ‘Vivir Bien: a study in alterity’. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 12:2, 113-132.

Summary: The Vivir Bien was conceived by Bolivian intellectuals, apparently according to
indigenous precepts. This article reveals how the ideologues are city-based intellectuals
with an idealised view of rural alterity, and that the concept does not exist emically in any of
the country’s ethnic communities. I explore a flagship attempt to implement the Vivir Bien,
challenging claims it fails to create real change, with the aim of aiding adaptation to climate
change. In my analysis, it fell significantly short of ideals of ethnic equality and auto-
determination it championed, repeating tropes of western superiority that have
characterised the country’s colonial history: the resultant scheme was a tourism initiative,
training indigenous children to carry westerners’ backpacks, and women to cook
hygienically for tourists (2018).
CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

March 2021 Invited Speaker, Radical Anthropology Group, UCL.

February 2021 Invited Speaker, Teachers Against the Climate Crisis, India
April 2020 Invited Speaker, Human Ecology Resource Group, UCL.
March 2018 Invited Speaker, Politicised provision: ethnographic perspectives on welfare
under Latin America’s new left. UCL
Oct-Nov 2017 Convenor, Seminar Series: Climate change as the end of the world?
Imagining Apocalypse. Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, UCL.
November 2017 Invited speaker, Departmental Seminar in Social Anthropology, UCL.
July 2016 Lab Convenor and panel contributor, Association of Social Anthropologists
of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Conference 2016, University of
Durham.
May 2016 Panel Convenor and Speaker, Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change,
Royal Anthropological Institute Conference.
April 2016 Speaker, Institute of Latin American Studies Seminar, Senate House,
London.
October 2015 Invited Speaker, Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP) Conference,
Virginia Commonwealth University, USA.
June 2015 Panel Contributor, RAI Postgraduate Conference, Manchester.
May 2015 Speaker and Panel Co-convenor, Society for Latin American Studies
Conference, University of Aberdeen.
May 2014 Invited speaker, Departmental Seminar, Latin American Studies, University
of St Andrews.
February 2014 Convenor: Fracking in Barton Moss: Academics meet Activists. University of
Manchester Students Union.
April 2013 Speaker and Panel Co-Convenor Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
Conference, University of Manchester.
April 2013 Conference convenor: The Art of Ethnographic Writing, University of
Manchester, funded by North West Doctoral Training Partnership.

SELECTED TEACHING

Feb 2020 Visiting Postgrad Teaching Fellow at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, D.F.
Course: Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change.
2017- 2019 Teaching Assistant at Department of Anthropology, UCL. Courses: BA
Introduction to Social Anthropology; Political Anthropology. Guest lecturer
in Political Anthropology.
2012-3 Teaching Assistant at University of Manchester in Social Anthropology:
Regional studies courses.

AWARDS AND PRIZES

ESRC New Investigator Fellowship, UCL, 2021-24.

ERIP Conference, Virginia 2015: Best Essay Prize for Vivir Bien: a Study in Alterity