Lindsay Ofrias is a doctoral candidate in anthropology. Her dissertation examines the political economy of environmental contamination and people’s struggles for conservation and survival in the extractive frontier of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Coupling Medical Anthropology’s concern with theories of violence with Political Ecology and Legal Anthropology’s interest in how profit incentives and liability structures mechanize disaster, Lindsay’s work probes the relationship between violence against environmental defenders and harm to the environment. Her conference presentations, policy papers, academic articles, and multimedia reports are likewise committed to documenting global and grassroots efforts for healing and justice. Her research has been published in the journals Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (in 2019, with Gordon Roecker), Culture, Theory & Critique (in 2017), NACLA (in 2017), as well as several blogs.

Lindsay has been a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellow (2018), a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellow (for Quichua, through the University of Madison, 2018), a Brazil Global Fellow at Princeton University (2015) and a Lassen Fellow at Princeton University (2014). During 2020, Lindsay is also a fellow with the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

In 2019, Lindsay was a co-organizer of the Indigenous/Settler conference at Princeton. Prior to coming to Princeton, Lindsay earned a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Master of Arts in anthropology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was assistant instructor in courses at the University of Colorado at Boulder (Frontiers of Cultural Anthropology; Peoples of the South Pacific; and Exploring Culture and Gender through Film), FLACSO-Ecuador (Sociology of Socio-environmental Conflict), and Princeton University (The Ethnographer’s Craft).