Gianfranco Selgas De Silvi

I am apostdoctoral researcher in political ecology at KTH SEED, affiliated with the Division of Strategic Sustainability Studies, 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.

Trained as a Latin Americanist, my interdisciplinary research integrates methods from the humanities and social sciences and is informed by critical social theory, environmental history, and political ecology. It examines the dialectical relationship between political, economic, and socio-environmental transformations in contexts 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 monograph, Assembled Regionalism: Culture, Political Ecology and Extractivisms in Latin America (1930-1940) (in Spanish). 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 (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 examines the geohistorical and socio-ecological scale of energy consumption and the political and territorial configurations of extraction within an expanded understanding of the Global South; Energy Matters (Environmental Humanities, 2025, with Manuel Silva-Ferrer), which rethinks Latin America's role in global energy systems and the socio-cultural understanding 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.