Silvia is a social anthropologist with 15 years of professional experience working on questions of energy and development in South and Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Her early work was awarded the LSE Lucy Mair Prize and focused on ‘appropriate technology’ interventions against deforestation in Kampong Chhnang, Cambodia, as a post-genocide context. Her more recent work was funded by the ESRC and centred on the labour practices that seek to mitigate the precarity and unevenness of energy access for communities living at the margins of the Indian state, in the Sundarban region of Bengal. 

As a ESRC fellow at the LSE, Silvia is developing a new research project on the metrology of ‘impact’ in relation to off-grid solar repair, as an entry point into the increasing quantification and financialization of development processes. She is also working on her first book, whose central concern is to illuminate the forms of labour, knowledge, and expertise that sustain the provision of electronics repair services in low-income, energy-poor settings.

Background:

2018-24: PhD Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

2017-18: MScR Social Anthropology, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

2015-17: MSc Anthropology and Development, London School of Economics and Political Science