Eduardo Javier Romero Dianderas

EDUARDO ROMERO DIANDERAS, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in April 2018 to aid research on “Inscribing Rainforests: Engineers, Information and the Epistemic Politics of Forest Bureaucracies in the Peruvian Amazon,” supervised by Dr. Paige West. This dissertation research examines rainforest governance from the perspective of the lives and practices of engineers, topographers and technicians in charge of producing and maintaining technical and bureaucratic information in the Amazonian region of Loreto, Peru’s vastest, most isolated and least populated region. The work follows the the political, affective and epistemic dynamics that emerge from rainforest information management around three axis: the supervision of logging activities, the demarcation of indigenous property titles (contemporary) and the rise of rainforest governance during the Amazonian rubber boom, at the turn of the 20th century (historic). By following the activities of state and nonstate technical workers in the rainforest and in the offices where information is processed and made part of administrative judgments, the study seeks to make clear how information becomes, rather than a neutral form of knowledge, a highly complex political, affective and moral form of experience that brings together various kinds of human and nonhuman forces.