PROFILE

Diego Silva is an economist and anthropologist (PhD - IHEID 2017) whose work is located at the intersection of environmental and economic anthropology, science and technology studies, and agrarian studies. For more than ten years, he has investigated the ways in which agrarian worlds are transformed by the introduction of technological and market innovations in Latin America, including the development of genetically engineered seeds in Colombia, various climate-smart technologies in Argentina, and the emergence carbon markets in forest and agrarian settings in the region.

He is the recipient of the Marcel Roche Award from the Latin American Association for the Social Studies of Science (Esocite) for the best scientific article of 2022. His PhD thesis on agricultural biosafety in Colombia was awarded the Lateinamerika Preis for the best Swiss thesis in Latin American Studies (University of St. Gallen), and the Prix des Anciens for the best 2017 PhD thesis of the Geneva Graduate Institute. Diego’s work has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Doc.CH and Early Postdoc grants), the Swiss Network of International Studies (SNIS research grant) and the Organization of American States (OAS), among others.

As part of his academic service and political engagements, Diego is the founding editor of the Grassroots section of the Journal of Political Ecology, dedicated to publishing work about socio-environmental movements. Outside of academia, Diego has had the opportunity to work for the Colombian Ministry of Agriculture, the Canadian Foundation for the Americas, and the Dutch environmental NGO Tropenbos in the Colombian Amazon, among others.
 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

D. Nelsa, S. Diego, H. Nathalia, G. Laura, F. Benno, N. Martina. 2024. Unraveling the colonialities of climate change and action. Introduction to the special issue “Colonialities of climate change and action.” Journal of Political Ecology 31(1): 624-635. https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.6365

Silva Diego. 2024. Carbon Nuggets: Cashew, Chocolate and Carbon Farming in Colombia. Harvard Review of Latin American Studies 23(2):1-16

Galvin Shaila & Silva Diego. 2023. The political life of mitigation initiatives: from carbon accounting to carbon accountability. Journal of Peasant Studies 50(6): 2259–2282 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2153043

Silva Diego. 2023. “Seed activism, patent politics and litigation in the global south” by Karine Peschard. AAG Reviews 11(4): 5-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2023.2240963

Silva Diego, Hernandez Nathalia, Holmes Christina. 2022. Wounded relational worlds: destruction and resilience of multispecies relationality in the age of climate change. Alternautas 9(1): 129-162. https://doi.org/10.31273/an.v9i1.1172

Silva Diego. 2021. From standard to region-specific monocrops: localizing industrial agriculture through microbes’ taste of place. Tsantsa: Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association 26(1): 18-36. https://doi.org/10.36950/tsantsa.2021.26.6921

Silva Diego. 2021. Keep calm and carry on: climate ready crops and the genetic codification of climate ignorance. Science Technology & Human Values. 46(5) 1048-1075. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920974092

Silva Diego & Gutierrez Laura. 2020. Revolturas: resisting multinational seed corporations and legal seed regimes through seed saving practices in Colombia. Journal of Peasant Studies. 47(4): 674-679. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1668780

Silva Diego. 2020. Argentinean agribusiness and the porous agricultural company. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. 3(1): 170-189. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2020.1768792