Dr Riccarda Flemmer is Junior Professor for Political Struggles in the Global South of the ‘Global Encounters’ Platform at the Institute of Political Science, University of Tübingen, since April 2022.
She studied Political Science, Sociology and Psychology (Magister Artium) at the RWTH Aachen University and at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She completed her doctorate in International Relations at the University of Hamburg in 2019. The title of her dissertation is ‘The Contested Meaning of Prior Consultation and FPIC – lndigenous Grassroots and the Politics of Translating Rights in Struggles over Resources in the Peruvian Amazon’.
She previously worked as a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and the University of Bielefeld in projects supported by the German Foundation for Peace Research (DSF) and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). As well, she taught and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science, especially Global Governance, at the University of Hamburg. As an academic co-presenter and translator, she continues to accompany the events of the Kulturbüro Grupo Sal with Kichwa activist Patricia Gualinga from the indigenous Amazonian community of Sarayaku in Ecuador.
Riccarda Flemmer is co-chair of the Amazonia Section at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), member of the Advisory Board of the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research’s (HIIK) annual Conflict Barometer and part of the focal group on ‘Ethnographic Methods’ of the Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft (DVPW) as well as part of the Environmental Justice Network (EnJust), the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) and the Red de Estudios sobre las Resistencias Indígenas (RERI).
Her publications on contested norms, indigenous peoples’ rights, participatory conflict transformation and socioecological conflicts have appeared in World Development, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of Latin American Studies and the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, among other publications.
Main Research Interests
• Indigenous peoples’ rights, indigenous resistance, rights of nature
• Environmental justice and emancipatory conflict transformation
• Resource conflicts and extractive industries
• Critical Development Studies
• Ethnographic and decolonial methods
• Empirical focus: Latin America, especially Amazonia
