Barbara Hogenboom’s field of study is the politics and governance of development and environment, viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research focuses on the clashing values and interests at play in connection with the use of natural resources in Latin America. She studies the interactions between the public sector, the private sector and social movements from the perspective of the international political economy. These interactions are cross-scale in nature: global and regional changes exert influence on national and local processes, and vice versa.

Barbara Hogenboom conducts research into current developments in Latin America in the context of various international projects: the impact of growing Chinese interests in the oil sector and mining industry, as well as the increasing local resistance to large-scale extraction projects. She also coordinates the new SDG project LFFU: ‘Leave fossil fuels underground for sustainable and inclusive development: Co-creating alternative pathways in Africa and Latin America’. In this project, a team from the UvA, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, University of the Witwatersrand and Oilwatch are examining promising local initiatives for leaving fossil fuels underground in favour of sustainable development.

Latin American Studies and CEDLA

In her capacity as a professor, Barbara Hogenboom will also serve as director of CEDLA. This multidisciplinary research institute has, over the past fifty years, gained national and international recognition as an inter-university centre. CEDLA focuses on Latin America and brings together research, education, documentation, publications and public events. The institute hosts many visiting researchers and PhD candidates from other countries, for instance, while the CEDLA library is home to the second-largest Latin America collection in Europe.

The integration of CEDLA into the UvA Faculty of Humanities in 2015 has resulted in a need for expansion of its teaching and externally-financed research. To that end, Barbara Hogenboom has made it her goal to expand CEDLA’s platform function. An important step has already been taken in the form of the new Bachelor’s programme in Spanish and Latin American Studies, together with colleagues of the capacity group Romance languages and cultures. The CEDLA Master’s programme (CMP)and the NWO-funded national Graduate Programme for Latin American Studies (LASP) will also be expanded. New interdisciplinary research initiatives centre among other things on the theme of ‘Reshaping Society and the Commons in Latin America’. The embedding of CEDLA’s research into the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) offers new possibilities for collaboration and profiling as well.

About Barbara Hogenboom

Barbara Hogenboom is a political scientist and has been working at CEDLA since 2001, first as an assistant professor and – since 2012 – as an associate professor. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, she has published nine books and seven special issues, including Environmental Governance in Latin America (2016) with Fabio de Castro and Michiel Baud, and The Extractive Imperative in Latin America (2016) with Murat Arsel and Lorenzo Pellegrini. Hogenboom is managing editor of the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She coordinated a consortium of ten European and Latin American universities for the EU-FP7 project ‘Environmental Governance in Latin American and the Caribbean: Developing Frameworks for Sustainable and Equitable Natural Resource Use’ (ENGOV, 2011-2015).