Lindsay Ofrias
Postdoctoral Fellow – McGill University
Email: lofrias@princeton.edu

Lindsay Ofrias is an L4E Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. Situated primarily in the oil frontier of Amazonian Ecuador, her research explores the relationship between human healing and environmental justice. She is particularly interested in the power of grassroots movements to disrupt destructive systems through their making political demands in court and engaging in everyday care practices. Her passion for participating in collective change motivates her to collaborate in projects that bring underrepresented perspectives more to bear on public debate. Currently, this passion is finding expression in a feature-length documentary film production.
Lindsay received her B.A. from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she discovered the importance of the relationship between law, ecological sustainability, and collective wellbeing. Wishing to center people’s lived experiences (which are often relegated to the realm of “anecdotal evidence”), she then decided to pursue an M.A. degree in Anthropology at the University of Colorado. This eventually led her to Princeton University, where she conducted her doctoral research. Her academic trajectory has been greatly influenced by a Permaculture/Ecological Design certification course she completed in 2009 at the Center for Bioregional Living in New York. New to McGill (beginning the post-doc during the Fall 2022 semester), she is excited to join the L4E community in allowing play, experiment, and radical hope to enliven the work of building a more just global society, caring for all forms of life.
PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORKS
Peer-Reviewed Articles
2019 Ofrias, L. and G. Roecker. Organized Criminals, Human Rights Defenders, and Oil Companies: Weaponization of the RICO Act across Jurisdictional Borders. Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 85: 37-50.
2017 Invisible Harms, Invisible Profits: A Theory of the Incentive to Contaminate. Culture, Theory and Critique 58(4): 435-456.
Book Chapters
2022. S. Sawyer and L. Ofrias. “Oil, Law, Temporality and Indigenous Rights.” In Handbook on Oil and International Relations, edited by Roland Dannreuther and Wojciech Ostrowski. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Dissertation
Healing Justice: Environmental Defenders and a Thriving Amazonia.
Film
RICO (in production)