Laetitia's research contributes to the Vital Elements & Postcolonial Moves project (PI: Aouatef M’charek). At the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies, her ethnography attends to how the multiple forms of life and livelihoods inhabiting Gafsa's mining basin, Tunisia, are configured by the production of phosphate rocks and fertilizers. Doing so, she explores how imperial relations are (re)produced and contested, and what this means for the possibilities of living and remaining in the mining basin.

Her work sits with the question of how place-based research might produce critical knowledge about the violences of extractivism while being attentive to the attachments, practices, and imaginaries through which people endure and discreetly resist long-established extractive dynamics.

She holds a BSc in Life Sciences and Philosophy from Erasmus University College in Rotterdam and an MRes in Environmental Studies from EHESS in Paris. She has experience working as a translator and fixer for grassroots communities organising against fossil fuel infrastructure.

Research methods

• ethnography
• semi-directed interviews
• participant observation
• senses as collaborative practices of knowing, understanding, and evidencing neglected histories
• forensics as an art of paying attention & trailing (developed with the Vital Elements Team)

Current research projects

• Making Fertilizers, Shaping Postcolonial Landscapes
  An ethnography of phosphate extraction and transformation in Gafsa, Tunisia, examining how phosphate becomes a resource through contested material, political, and ecological assemblages

• Philosophy of Sciences (2027)
• Ethnographies & Academic Writings (2025)
• Designing In(ter)ventions into Human-Machines Entanglements (2025)