Laura Affolter, PhD

I am a social anthropologist, specialising in legal and political anthropology. In my current work, I examine the transformative potential of the rights of nature through an ethnographic study of mining conflicts in Ecuador, focusing on the political, social, and epistemological effects of the practical mobilisations of these constitutional rights. Before joining the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Futures of Sustainability”, I was a research associate in the Research Group on the Sociology of Law at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, where I obtained my PhD in 2017. My dissertation, in which I examined everyday practices of administrative decision-making in a Swiss asylum bureaucracy, was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan in the Socio-Legal Series as Asylum Matters: On the Front Line of Administrative Decision-Making. I have also worked as a lecturer at the Universities of Bern and Fribourg as well as the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.

In 2008, Ecuador introduced a new constitution which formally recognises nature as a legal subject and grants it its own subjective rights. Over the past years, these rights have become an important resistance tool in legal struggles against industrial mining across the country. In several cases, courts have, at least temporarily, halted mining projects due to a breach of these rights. In my research project, I examine the political, social and epistemological effects of these rights. In doing so, I, on the one hand, engage with debates around the potential, limits and dangers of the judicialization of politics and how the involvement of courts in political decision-making relates to democratic politics. On the other hand, by focusing on practices of rights mobilisation, I critically engage with an often-found assumption that the emancipatory potential of nature’s rights inheres in the shift from so-called anthropocentric to eco-centric law. I empirically focus on the conflicts and struggles around the Llurimagua mining project in the Ecuadorian Íntag area by drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic approach.

Summer Term 25: Recht und Extractivismus (Law and Extractivism), B.A. seminar, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg

Winter Term 24/25: Rechte der Natur: Kritische Perspektiven auf einen globalen Trend (Rights of Nature: Critical Perspectives on a Global Trend), B.A./M.A. seminar, University of Bern

Summer Term 19: Mit Recht zu Gerechtigkeit? Debatten aus der Rechtsanthropologie (From Law to Justice), B.A./M.A. seminar, University of Fribourg

Winter Term 13/14: Einführung in die Sozialanthropologie (Introduction to Social Anthropology), B.A. seminar, University of Bern

Winter Term 12/13: Einführung in die Sozialanthropologie (Introduction to Social Anthropology), B.A. seminar, University of Bern

Summer Term 12: Anthropologie der Bürokratie (Anthropology of Bureucracy), B.A. seminar, University of Bern