Silas Grant completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2021. Silas’s dissertation and current book project, Patchwork: Land, Law, and Extraction in the Greater Chaco, is an ethnography of controversial oil and gas extraction in northwestern New Mexico. It draws on two years of archival and ethnographic research with Diné communities living in a jurisdictionally complex space just east of the Navajo Reservation and in the heart of a recent fracking boom near Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
Silas is a 2021-2023 Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. Broadly, their work examines how settler colonial administrative practices produce environmental violence as well as the very conditions of its intelligibility across legal, regulatory, and scientific domains. With Diné colleagues, Silas is currently developing a new research project on energy transitions, environmental justice, and the politics of land.
Silas is actively engaged in environmental justice and health equity work, and is currently co-producing a full-length documentary film on the Indigenous-led fight to protect the Greater Chaco landscape from fracking. To learn more, visit Silas’s website.