Gianfranco Selgas De Silvi

I am an early-career researcher in political ecology and co-director of the Political Ecology Research Theme @ KTH SEED, affiliated with the Division of Strategic Sustainability Studies (KTH SEED), and my research is currently supported by Formas (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development). Prior to joining KTH in 2026, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London (UCL), where I conducted research and taught at the Centre for Multidisciplinary and Intercultural Inquiry (CMII), between 2022-2025. Since 2026, I am also co-director of The Situated Ecologies Platform, an interdisciplinary collaborative network to contest and democratize the study of ecology.

Trained as a Latin Americanist, my interdisciplinary research integrates methods from the humanities and social sciences and is informed by critical social theory, urban-environmental history, and political ecology. It examines the dialectical relationship between political, economic, and socio-environmental transformations in territories of resource extraction, with a particular focus on Venezuela. My earlier work started with the completion of my PhD at Stockholm University (2022) and the publication of my first book Regionalismo ensamblado: Cultura, ecología política y extractivismos en Latinoamérica (1930-1940) (published in Spanish and Open Access to remain freely accessible to the communities it studies, while directly challenging the English-centric convention of foreign Latin American scholarship). The book analyzes the production and circulation of socio-ecological knowledge and traces the emergence of political ecology as a critical intellectual and political discourse in Latin America during the Great Depression (1930-1940).

My current research agenda focuses on two interrelated projects. My primary project, supported by the Formas Career Grant for Early Career Researchers, examines the political ecology of the state, socio-environmental governance, and energy politics in Venezuela. It explores how oil, gas, and mineral infrastructures are interrelated with institutional and political-economic mechanisms and discourses that shape the management, mediation, delivery, and production of nature as value. A key objective is to understand the broader implications of these dynamics for climate governance and democratic resilience. My secondary project, which received the support of The British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022-2025), is a book in progress that investigates how ideas of uneven development, modernization, dependency, and resource management of oil, minerals, and agriculture, circulated across political institutions, international financial capital, and state planning apparatuses in twentieth-century petroleum-centered Venezuela.

Recently collaborative projects completed include Archives of the Planetary Mine (Geoforum, 2026, with Henrik Ernstson), which proposes a geohistorical materialist practice on how critical human geography and political ecology can account for the global social relations of energy and extraction at a moment when the shift from fossil fuels to "transition" minerals are expanding extractivism rather than resolving it; Energy Matters (Environmental Humanities, 2025), which rethinks Latin America's role in global energy systems and the socio-cultural critique of energy; and the edited volume Contesting the Climate Unthinkable (University Press of Florida, 2025), which explores how culture reflects environmental transformations driven by colonization, capitalism, and resource extraction in Latin America and the Caribbean.