Cristina Conesa Pla
Political Theory (LSE)
About Me
I am a 4th year PhD candidate in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My doctoral research investigates how indigeneity and indigenous resurgence can be understood as political phenomena that shape and transform alternative political paradigms.
My thesis, "Contested Paradigms: Indigenous Resurgence and Political Alternatives in Ecuador", examines concepts like Sumak Kawsay (Buen Vivir), plurinationality, collective rights, and interculturality not merely as policy innovations, but as forms of political world-making that challenge dominant conceptions of identity, sovereignty, and legitimacy. I am currently an Academic Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan (2025–2026) and conducted fieldwork in Ecuador from April to June 2025.
I have been awarded the APSA Advancing Research Grant for Indigenous Politics and the Sir Patrick Gillam Scholarship Fund for Fieldwork. I also received the Best Teacher Award at LSE for the 2023–2024 academic year. I am passionate about teaching and have taught courses in political theory, global political thought, and international relations at LSE and King’s College London.
Curriculum Vitae
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Research Interests
Indigenous Politics and Indigenous Resurgence
Providing a systemic account of indigenous resurgence as a political phenomenon.
Latin America and Andean Politics
Analyzing indigenous movements and state-building processes in Ecuador and the Andean region.
Paradigm Formation and Contestation
Investigating how indigenous paradigms emerge through processes of mobilization and institutionalization.
Conceptual Innovation
Developing theoretical frameworks to understand indigenous political alternatives and their global implications.
Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies
Engaging with decolonial thought to challenge Western political frameworks and epistemic assumptions.
Working Papers
The Double Bind of Difference: Indigenous Resurgence Between Alterity and Co-optation
2025 — Under Review
This article uses the mobilization of Sumak Kawsay (SK)—a Kichwa concept institutionalized as Buen Vivir in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution—to probe a paradox of difference: projects that mobilize distinctiveness are praised when they appear other yet dismissed as co-opted when they engage institutions. To navigate this bind, it advances a dual framework—partial connections and essential relationism—to explain how SK retains force across arenas. Partial connections show how claims travel through overlapping fields without collapsing into sameness; essential relationism offers a criterion of negotiated coherence that tracks how relational orientations endure across translations without fixed outcomes. Drawing on Amazonian, Andean, and urban Indigenous actors, it portrays resurgence as situated negotiation rather than assertion. SK politics emerges as dynamic world-making rather than as pure alternative. Developed from Ecuador, the framework clarifies how relational projects persist amid recognition, contestation, and constraint, while acknowledging risks of essentialism and co-optation.
The Conservative Disposition of Collective Rights: Reclaiming Cultural Control in Ecuador
2025 — Working Paper
This article examines the political disposition of Indigenous collective rights in Ecuador, arguing that they are best understood as conservative in a small-c sense: that is, as oriented towards preserving the fragile conditions of collective continuity rather than fixed cultural contents. Drawing on ethnographic material from the Kitu Kara pueblo and a genealogical account of Ecuador's constitutional recognitions (1998, 2008), the paper traces how collective rights function as juridical instruments for securing cultural control—authority over the territorial, institutional, linguistic, and epistemic infrastructures through which a people sustains its world. Against liberal and communitarian debates that fixate on the subject of rights, it reorients attention to their object: the conditions under which a collective can 'go on together' under postcolonial rupture. The argument situates this conservative disposition within reparative struggles against ethnocide and epistemic marginalisation, and demonstrates, through cases in intercultural education, higher learning, and urban land use, the ambivalence of juridification as both medium and constraint of self-rule. In doing so, it reconceives conservation as a form of political labour—one that maintains the capacity for self-governed change within a plurinational constitutional order.
Get in Touch
I’m always interested in discussing research collaborations, speaking opportunities, or potential academic positions.
Bluesky
@cristinaconesa.bsky.social