Hanne Cottyn is an historian and researcher at the Institute of International Studies at the Arturo Prat University in Iquique, Chile. Her research focuses on socio-environmental transformations in the rural Andes. She is interested in how indigenous and campesino communities negotiate their access to land, manage communitarian territories, mobilise cross-border networks, navigate changes in the landscape, and participate in processes of commodification. Her work combines historical insight in local dynamics with a critical global perspective.
Since 2008, she has spent extensive time in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Chile, working with indigenous and campesino communities, grassroots movements, NGOs and scholars. In 2014, she completed a PhD in History at Ghent University in her native Belgium with a study on indigenous struggles for community land rights in late 19th and early 20th century Bolivia. She went on working with environmental activist movements in Peru, and returned to academia, first at Ghent University and subsequently at the University of York, to conduct postdoctoral research on the historical trajectories of land and conservation conflicts in Andean highland communities, in collaboration with Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian partners.
As an ISRF Independent Scholar Fellow at York, she extended this research to the Poopó Lake basin in Bolivia, developing a historicising approach to local indigenous responses to the desertification of the lake. She then took up a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University and Universidad de Tarapacá (Chile), studying the “more-than-human” histories behind rural landscape transformations in the Bolivian-Chilean highlands over the last 2 centuries, in collaboration with local communities and organisations.
