Gediminas Lesutis
Senior Political Economist
I am an interdisciplinary thinker, researcher, and practitioner. My work is situated at the intersection of critical political economy, social geography, and ethnography. It explores relations of urban development, capital, power, inequality, and contestation, and how they are contingently mediated across spaces of everyday life.
Research Interests
My research focuses on social and political effects of capitalist development and its intensification across East and South Africa – particularly in extractive industries, mega-infrastructures, or urban areas.
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I draw on social geography, global political economy, critical theory, and ethnography in analysing how im/possibilities of a liveable life are co-constituted and unfold through scale-making processes of extractive capital accumulation.
Whilst I have specifically explored these questions in contexts of Mozambique and Kenya, in my writing, I reflect on how the experiences of these time- and space-specific realities critically inform questions of capitalist development, power, liveability, and resistance in global politics.
Alongside these established lines of inquiry, recently I started exploring queer theory and its multiple epistemologies; specifically their broader applicability in the study of global politics beyond matters of identity, gender, and sexuality.