Gisa Weszkalnys

I am an economic anthropologist with an interest in how the future figures in human practice. My research pioneers an ethnographic analysis of future making as a political, material, and affective endeavour central to contemporary capitalism. I have carried out a number of significant research projects working both independently and in interdisciplinary teams, and have also worked as consultant researcher for a number of third sector and corporate organisations. My research has been published widely, including the book 'Berlin, Alexanderplatz: Transforming Place in a Unified Germany' (Berghahn, 2010), and a vole co-edited with Simone Abram, entitled 'Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World' (Berghahn, 2013). I am now writing a second monograph with the working title 'A Doubtful Hope: Oil, Wealth, and Time in Atlantic Africa'. The book tracks the speculative logics at play in offshore hydrocarbon exploration in São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea, and examines a new and deeply racialised politics of resource management, which revolves not simply around the democratic and technical aspects of oil’s exploitation but increasingly the affective dissonances associated with it. I build on my interest in the multiple and occasionally inconsistent temporalities of hydrocarbon extraction in a new UKRI-funded project entitled Fraying ties? Networks, territory and transformation in the UK oil sector (with Gavin Bridge, Durham University; Nana de Graaff, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; and James Marriott, Platform).