Diana Pardo Pedraza

Diana Pardo Pedraza is an assistant professor of anthropology and international affairs at the George Washington University. Her ethnographic research focuses on improvised explosive devices and mine clearance and explores (de)militarized landscapes, humanitarian relations of care, and post-conflict politics.

At Radcliffe, Pardo Pedraza is completing a book manuscript, provisionally titled “Landscapes of Suspicion: Minefields, Peace Laboratories, and the Ecologies of (Post)War in Colombia,” an ethnography of a “peace laboratory” built around the clearance and liberation of territories occupied by the threat of improvised landmines during the decades-long political violence. The book illuminates the possibilities and challenges of ecological and political reconciliation by calling attention to war-inherited suspicion and how postwar interventions reshape it.

Pardo Pedraza has received various grants and awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She has published in numerous journals, including Anthropological Quarterly; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Current Anthropology; and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society. Her work is also forthcoming in American Ethnologist, Critical Ethnic Studies, and Environmental Humanities. She earned a BA in history and MA in cultural studies from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and a PhD in cultural studies from the University of California, Davis.