On 1 July 2026 Nina Swen successfully defended her PhD thesis examining how Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon monitor oil spills and engage with regulatory science to render oil-related contamination legible.
For her analysis, Nina Swen carried out extensive ethnographic research with Quechua, Kichwa, Achuar and Cocama Indigenous federations, whose territories have been affected by five decades of oil extraction.
Concretely, she explored:
- How Indigenous conceptualizations of contamination have evolved, from the initial sensing of harm in the forest to encounters with scientific knowledge and environmental regulation.
- The administrative trajectory of a single, ordinary oil spill to examine how Indigenous monitors engage with regulatory science.
- The encounters between Indigenous federations and NGOs and with a focus on drones to examine the narratives and optimism surrounding the use of monitoring technologies in struggles for environmental justice.
- How Indigenous federations understand the ambivalence of environmental remediation as an imperfect yet tangible effort within their ongoing refusal of extractive dispossession and impunity.
Swen also reflected on the ethical as well as political challenges of engaged scholarship, particularly her own positionality as an active participant in the politics of knowledge production.
Rewatch Nina's defence introduction
