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 contestation, and how they are contingently mediated across topographies 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, and critical theory 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 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. 2023. Enduring colonial grammars of self: Infrastructure, coloniality, ethnicity. Antipode, early view.
Lesutis, G. 2022. The Politics of Precarity: Spaces of Extractivism, Violence, and Suffering. London and New York: Routledge.