Eva van Roekel

Dr Eva van Roekel

Political Economy Fellow 2021-22, Discretionary Award 2025-26

Radical Gold: Emergency Resource Extraction and Trade in the Northern Amazon

This research will provide the first in-depth analysis of emergency resource extraction and trade of gold in the context of the humanitarian crisis and the growing ecological degradation in the Northern Amazon. The project will focus specifically on Venezuelan/Brazilian borderlands that increasingly show patterns of extra-legal gold extraction as a way of survival that permeate global commodity chains (e.g. mobile phones, jewellery).

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Falling

'Falling' confronts the uneasy spaces between memory, violence and moral responsibility in post-dictatorship Argentina.

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Research outcomes

van Roekel, E. (2024).

After Time. Bulletin of Independent Social Research Foundation, 30, 30.

Blog posts

After Time

Eva van Roekel explores the messiness and multiplicity of different cultural experiences of time in the face of climate disaster.

Areas of interest

Cultural Anthropology Ethnography Argentina South America Latin America Violence Human Rights Morality Visual Anthropology Fieldwork Film Venezuela Gold

Cohort

PEF4 Discretionary Award

Biography

Eva van Roekel is an assistant professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University for her ethnographic research on the trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina. Her research interests lie with violence, human rights, morality and visual anthropology. Fieldwork, writing and filming are her personal blend of doing anthropology for which she lived and worked for more than ten years in Venezuela and Argentina. She is the author of Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina (2020) published by Rutgers University Press and various peer-reviewed articles and fictional stories. She has also made three documentaries. She is cofounder of Dokumento, a cultural platform for storytelling, and editor of the Dutch anthropological journal Etnofoor. Her current ethnographic inquiry focuses on the role of gold in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

Biographical details correct as of 06.10.25