Independent Researcher
Biography
Gard is a Norwegian anthropologist with strong ties to Ecuador and Latin America. The last ten years he has cultivated an interest for gold mining and conducted ethnographic fieldworks with miners and regulators across mining districts in southern Ecuador. His PhD project focused on the expansion of small-scale gold mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in particular the becoming of Shuar indigenous gold miners. His dissertation describes the whys and hows of this recent turn to mining and situate it historically amid prior colonial transformations. Methodologically, Gard is an empiricist committed to ethnography both as a research practice of collaboration and as continuous theoretical reflection. Conceptually he draws upon anthropological, philosophical and economic theory and moves in the tensions between political economy and political ontology. Gard is currently converting his Ph.D. dissertation into a book manuscript as well as co-writing an article about the Shuar turn to gold mining with a close Shuar collaborator.
Selected publications
Vangsnes, G.F. (2025). The Narrative Predictability of Political Ecology: Ethnographic Refusals from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Journal of Political Ecology, 32 (1).
Vangsnes, G.F. (2018). The Meanings of Mining: A Perspective of the Regulation of Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining in Southern Ecuador. Journal of Extractive Industries and Society, Vol. 5, Issue 2, pp. 317-326.
