Dr Stephanie Postar

Postdoctoral Affiliate

Research:

Stephanie Postar is an environmental anthropologist specializing in energy and natural resources in the Global South. Her research engages with the politics and practices that shape decisions about and attitudes toward natural resource use and management in sub-Saharan Africa.

Her doctoral research in Social Anthropology (University of Oxford, 2018) examined the multiple and dynamic values of natural resources in rural Tanzania at the intersection of mining, development, and wildlife conservation. Ethnographic research focused on the villages just outside of sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest and largest wilderness area, where construction on Tanzania’s first uranium mine has been indefinitely delayed. She argued for the importance of examining how resources can intersect with, and therefore impact, each other, contributing to major debates on natural resources in the anthropology of environment and development.

Stephanie is in the beginning stages of her next research project, which turns attention to refined uranium products in Tanzania and their domestic regulation. She is also editing an interdisciplinary collection on resource extraction and social exclusion. Stephanie currently serves as the Editorial Assistant for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI).

Before pursuing her doctorate, Stephanie worked for an international human rights organization.

Research Interests:

Environmental anthropology; political ecology; anthropology of development; wildlife conservation; corporate social responsibility; social studies of science in Africa; natural resources; energy; precarity and uncertainty

Recent Publications:

(in press) ‘A conversation with Michael D. Jackson, writer and reader: on being an outsider, and the aporias of lived experience’. Interview by Stephanie Postar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

2017. ‘The Half-Lives of African Uranium: A Historical Review’. The Extractive Industries and Society, 4(2): 398-409.