Dr Oscar Pedraza is a Research Associate in the Department of War Studies, working on the research project, Mapping Injury, led by Professor Vivienne Jabri, selected by the ERC Advanced, and funded by the UKRI Frontier Research Grant. The project investigates ‘injury’ in its multiple sites and manifestations in the Global South, and its impact on political agency and global mechanisms of response. Oscar’s research on the project focuses on Colombia.

Oscar has a PhD in Anthropology from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Before coming to King’s Oscar held positions at UCLA at the Institute of Genetics and Society, University of Southern California’s Center of History Law and Culture and Bard College Human Rights and the Arts program. He also co-directed a collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture, where he is a fellow researcher.

His current work for Mapping Injury examines the modes in which the environment is articulated as a mediator of violence, shaping the form of the earth as a result. Engaging in current conversations of volume, verticality, media and subterranean politics, he studies terraforming as a material struggle between diverging modes of existence in the making of the coal mine Cerrejon in Guajira, Colombia. Oscar is also a co-founder of Plano Negativo, a visual Investigations collective in Colombia.

Research Interests

• Extractivism
• Social Movements
• Political violence
• History and Memory
• Media and evidence

Publications

• Tracking Absence Through Presence at Colombia’s Palace of Justice: Among the unanswered questions about the military’s response to the 1985 attack on the seat of the judiciary is what happened to the disappeared victims. New research sheds light on the unknowns, including how an unassuming museum was part of the story. NACLA Report on the Americas, 56(2), 137–145.
• Pedraza, O., & Meszaros Martin, H. (2022). The memory of earth and land dispossession in Urabá. Journal of Visual Culture, 20(3), 543-562.
• Pedraza, O., & Meszaros Martin, H “Extinction in transition: coca, coal, and the production of enmity in Colombia's post-peace accords environment”, Journal of Political Ecology 28(1), 721-74.0