I am beginning my dissertation tentatively titled, Contesting the Public: Worldmaking from Guyana’s Oil Frontier. Guyana has long positioned itself as a leading “green” development state in the international climate arena, with de jure protection of the right to healthy environment enshrined in its constitution. Against this backdrop, the recent boom in oil and gas production offers a generative prism to illuminate central challenges of our time: the entanglement between fossil-fueled development, compounding climate impacts, and efforts to imagine and enact care-centered alternatives. This project examines how struggles over the burgeoning oil and gas industry in Guyana are transforming the terrain of human and environmental interests that count, the temporal horizons that matter, and the possibilities for redistributive economic and social development. Utilizing archival research, interviews, and ethnography, this study investigates how “the public” has been legally constructed and contested within (neo)colonial resource regimes, and how grassroots and diasporic actors mobilize to shape resource governance and envision care-centered presents and futures that hold obligations to both ancestors and descendants across the human/non-human divide.

Her work is supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Global Democracy Commons, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Publications

Feign, Anna. “Late Petro-State Politics: The Struggle for Temporal Hegemony in Guyana.” In Preparation

Feign, Anna. Forthcoming. Review of The Petro-State Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago, by Ryan Jobson. SOULS.