Dr Julie Dayot

I am an ethnographer working at the intersection of political ecology and ecological economics. My research explores how people navigate environmental change, extractivism and development, with a particular focus on Indigenous territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Across my work, I am interested in what can be obscured when theories, institutions and political narratives make complex human-environment relations legible: the material relations underlying environmental change and development, contradiction, situated agency, changing relationships with nature, and the plurality of values and forms of knowledge through which people make sense of environmental change.

My doctoral research examined the acceptance of oil extraction by Quichua communities of the Lower Napo River in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the dilemmas revealed by local decisions about extraction. It traces the material relations through which the costs and benefits of extractive development are produced, asking how environmental losses, socioeconomic needs and forms of dependency become connected over time. It also examines how development and extractivism reshape relationships with land, subsistence and communal life, and how environmental injustice can persist in the relative absence of overt conflict. I completed my PhD in International Development at the University of Oxford with funding from the Wolfson-Marriott Scholarship, the Fonds Sarah Andrieux (ENSAE Paris), and Funds for Women Graduates.

I joined the Sustainable Futures department and the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter in January 2023 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. My current research extends these questions to knowledge pluralism in the context of the ecological crisis. I am particularly interested in what happens when we take different ways of knowing, valuing and relating to the world seriously – particularly what they might contribute to how we understand and respond to contemporary crises – and what gets lost when academic and policy frameworks attempt to translate and incorporate them without fully engaging with the ways of understanding the world from which they emerge.