Fieldnotes from Amazonia

Linda Barclay Isles

Thursday 30 October 2025

Research Spotlight talks to Dr Jessica Hope, Lecturer in Sustainable Development who is currently in the Western Amazonia region of Bolivia on three months of fieldwork research.

What are you doing in Bolivia? 

This is the first field trip for a five-year ERC Starting Grant titled “Roads to Sustainability: exploring the infrastructures of a sustainable future”. I am here for three months, primarily to build a research team – recruiting eight Indigenous researchers from two Indigenous territories in the Bolivian Amazon. In May, I go to Ecuador to do the same. Together, we will research how commitments to major road building in the Amazon are impacting territorial rights, territorial environmental knowledges and conservation.

Tell us a bit about the practicalities of moving to the other side of the world for field work both for you and as a family.

I have two young daughters (8 and 4) and they are here with me. My project requires long-ish periods of fieldwork, partly as I am aiming to work collaboratively with Indigenous territories. It requires a lot from family life – they haven’t seen their Dad for 2.5 months. They have left their school, their nursery and their friends. For me as a parent, it means guiding them through a new country and a long time away from home. I carry the responsibility of ensuring it is an enriching and fun time for them, as well as a productive time for me work-wise.

Financially, it is costing me a lot of money in travel costs and for a school that teaches in English.

How was it made possible? 

I am thrilled to have an ERC Starting Grant – £1.5 million for five years – and happy to talk to any colleagues who are thinking of applying. However, this trip was also made possible by a supportive ex-husband and by the support I get from family and friends on WhatsApp.

Why is it necessary to physically be there for fieldwork? 

Broadly, my project investigates the infrastructures needed for a sustainable future and the ways that different material infrastructures differently influence trajectories of sustainability. We will do this in places that have long articulated radical environmental alternatives in the face of coloniality and rampant extractivism.

To learn from the expertise of Indigenous territorial movements in the Amazon, to find out how different types of infrastructures inform different types of place-based knowledges and environmental politics, as well as to see how global agendas are landing in the Amazon, I need to be in the field.

For my discipline (Critical Human Geography), fieldwork is crucial for researching how theories about the world exist in messy realities and using that empirical data to expand said theory. For part of my project, and as a very brief example, it means taking theories of how infrastructure shapes citizenship and asking how it rather shapes socio-environmental citizenship.

Namely, how a new road might discipline human-nature relationships (or rather, more-than-human relations) in line with state or corporate visions. Researching how that happens in the field (for example, in an Amazonian Indigenous territory) is crucial for advancing wider understandings of what different kinds of infrastructure mean for trajectories of sustainability (and global agendas to combat climate change).

You, along with other academics with parenting responsibilities, have written before about the balance between family and fieldwork – is it a problem which still persists, and if so, why? 

There are so many instances of field-based researchers taking their families to the field, as it is necessary and can be wonderful. However, though the policy frameworks for this are improving, they aren’t yet sufficient for ensuring that parents don’t have to choose between doing great work or being great parents.

We need to be able to charge the additional care costs created by a project to the grant (for example, children’s travel costs).  The implicit assumption seems to be that one parent has a lesser career and can look after the children, whilst the other does their work. However, this is no longer the dominant model in the UK and for me, as a woman scientist, does not fit.

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