Gediminas Lesutis
Marie Curie Fellow
I am an interdisciplinary scholar currently based at the University of Amsterdam. My work is at the intersection of global politics, social geography, and critical theory. It explores sociopolitical relations of capital, power, inequality, and resistance, and how they are contingently mediated across topographies of everyday life.
Research Interests
My research focuses on social and political effects of contemporary capitalist development and its intensification across East and South Africa – particularly in extractive industries, mega-infrastructures, or urban areas.
I draw on critical theory, social anthropology, and social and political geography in analysing modalities of politics, biopolitical governance, and social textures of everyday life co-constituted and unfolding 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 experiences of these time- and space-specific realities critically inform a number of key, inherently interdisciplinary questions on capital, power, liveability, and resistance in global politics.
Alongside these established lines of inquiry, recently I became interested in, and started exploring, queer theory and its multiple epistemologies; specifically their broader applicability in the study of the world and global politics beyond matters of identity, gender, and sexuality.
Publications
Lesutis, G. 2022. Politics of disavowal: megaprojects, infrastructural biopolitcs, disavowed subjects. The Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Accepted.
Lesutis, G. 2021. The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering. London and New York: Routledge.