On 07 December 2023, Tomás Usón successfully defended his PhD thesis “Remembering Future Disasters: Temporal Ecologies in the Peruvian Andes” at the Institute of European Ethnology at HU Berlin. He graduated with summa cum laude. The PhD thesis was supervised by Prof. Ignacio Farías and Prof. Sharon Macdonald (both HU Berlin) and further evaluated by Prof. Ben Orlove (Columbia University).
In his doctoral project, Tomás tackled the heterogeneous ways in which disasters engage with time using the Callejón de Huaylas in the Peruvian Ande as a case study. He ethnographically analysed how cities in this region have been coping with glacial-based and seismic disasters throughout the years, how the temporal arrangements disasters produce have (re)configured urban environments, and what type of conflicts those reconfigurations elicit.
Tomás will start working as a postdoc researcher at HU’s Geography Department on the project “Re-Scaling Global Health: Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet” together with Prof. Sandra Jasper and Prof. Ignacio Farías.
We congratulate Tomás on completing his doctoral thesis and wish him all the best for his future!
