Congratulations!José Carlos Tello Valle Hiriart successfully defended his doctoral thesis

29 October 2024

Photo: Tobias Schmitt

We are proud to announce the successful disputation of our SICSS member José Carlos Tello Valle Hiriart.

His dissertation “Multi-epistemic and pluriversal hybrid contexts: Actors' narratives and discourses about the Brazilian Amazon Land and Forest” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Martina Neuburger and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Scheffran (both Universität Hamburg).

Carlos' thesis explores Pluriversal thinking. A thinking that advocates for a world that accommodates diverse realities and knowledge systems, countering historical oppression by Western frameworks. In this idea, Carlos' thesis introduces "intersecting hybrid contexts"—groups between traditional/indigenous and modern worlds—as a way to expand pluriversal understanding. Focusing and zooming into the socio-environmental dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon, the thesis analyzes academic, media, and biographical discourses and narratives to illustrate how pluriversal hybrid contexts create ontologies and epistemologies while intersecting with dominant capitalist and Western ideologies.

Carlos was a member of the Institute of Geography (working group "Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities") at Universität Hamburg.

His future plans?

Carlos will be in the same working group and CLICCS C2 as a postdoc position until the end of 2025.