Thinking-Feeling the Colombia Conflict

Attilio Bernasconi is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoctoral fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences (anthropology) in June 2022 at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His thesis, titled “Thinking-Feeling the Margins: An Intersectional ethnography of the Conflict Within the Colombian Pacific Rainforest” brings on the complex dynamics that characterize the relationships between the ELN (National Liberation Army) guerrilla movement and the Colombian Pacific inhabitants. Attilio’s field of expertise includes the anthropology of the state and governance, with an emphasis on borderland areas where information, commodities, and people circulate – often illegally – at the margins of the state. After completing two Masters degrees, one in social anthropology and one in human geography, Attilio was PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Lausanne from 2015 to February 2022. From August 2018 to October 2020, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, while during the Spring semester 2022, he held a Lecturer position at the University of Bern, where his class — “Ethnographies of Struggle” — focused on inequalities related to the historical spatially uneven development of the capitalist mode of production, environmental racism, structural violence, and the construction of gender in armed groups. His teaching links these social struggles to the ones an anthropologist is confronted in her/his fieldwork, and which are related to questions of access, positionality, engagement, race, and gender.