FP Dr. Ponce is a social anthropologist with extensive experience in development-induced displacement, actual and spiritual forms of energy, and Chinese infrastructure in Southeast Asia, particularly Laos. Most of his recent publications have focused on how a Chinese hydropower project, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has created paradoxes in the lives of its displaced populations in northern Laos. He published his works in journals such as Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Asian Anthropology, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Advances in Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Affairs, among others.
His book in preparation examines how a Chinese project produces subjects of Chinese development’s tripartite projections. Dr. Ponce argues that the resettled are projected forward as their lives are forecast (predictive projection) and governed and organized by the project’s vision of modernity and mobilities (disciplinary projection), but they are loaded with what the project disavows, like poverty and hunger in the relocation site (externalizing projection, inspired by psychoanalytic notions of projection).
While a postdoctoral fellow at KWI, Dr. Ponce will closely collaborate with the CryoCultures research team. He will develop papers and mappings on the climate politics of artificial cooling among refrigerator users displaced by a Chinese hydropower in northern Laos, as well as on the affect of air conditioners among young Laotian scammers working in compounds of the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.