Lauri
Uusitalo
Contact
Links
Areas of expertise
Biography
I defended my doctoral dissertation A Colonial Frontier: Interethnic Interaction, Indigenous Agency, and the Formation of Colonial Society in the Gobernación of Popayán, 1540–1615 at Tampere University in 2021. Since earning my doctorate, I have researched, among other topics, the gendered agency of Indigenous peoples in the Spanish American colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
I am currently working on the project Maps for development: Finnish mapping practices in the postcolonial world, which investigates mapping practices and the production of cartographic knowledge in the context of development cooperation during the last three decades of the twentieth century.
Research
I specialize in the histories of colonialism, Indigenous Peoples, development cooperation, Latin America, and the Global South, with a particular interest in decolonial approaches. My research explores power, governance, and local agency across colonial and postcolonial contexts from the early modern period to the twentieth century. I am especially interested in the long-term legacies of colonialism, Indigenous agency, borderlands, spatiality, and intercultural encounters. I also examine how archives, cartography, legal institutions, and other forms of knowledge production shape power relations between states, institutions, and local communities. Across these themes, my work investigates how people and communities have negotiated, contested, and reshaped structures of power and domination.