Dr. Stephanie Postar

Biography

Stephanie Postar is an environmental anthropologist specializing in energy and natural resources in the Global South. Her research engages with the politics and practices that shape decisions and attitudes regarding natural resource use and management in sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where her doctoral research examined the dynamic values placed on natural resources in rural Tanzania in the context of mining, development, and wildlife conservation. This research asked critical questions about the micropolitics of land and resource management in the backdrop of a 'paused' industrial uranium mining project, drawing from oral histories of landscape change and the legitimate use of power by rural authorities. Her work is grounded in feminist political ecology and looks into the values of power across seemingly conflicting regimes of natural resource management, including mining and wildlife conservation. Furthermore, she highlights the political dimensions of natural heritage conservation in light of proposed extractive projects that threaten UNESCO natural world heritage sites. Currently, she is developing a research book and co-editing an interdisciplinary collection on resource extraction and exclusion. Previously, she was a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow at the Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley, leading the interdisciplinary MATRIX Prospecting Team to investigate the socio-political and economic impacts of COVID-19 on natural resource-extracting communities, which culminated in published findings in 2021. At LSE, she is starting a new research project that focuses on refined uranium products and domestic regulation in Tanzania, employing a decolonial feminist science studies perspective.

Research Interests

Experience