Dr. Francesca Mezzenzana

PI of the research group “Learning ‘Nature’: A Cross-Cultural Ethnography of Children’s Relationships to the Non-Human World”

Francesca Mezzenzana is an anthropologist working with the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon. She has a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is currently the Principal Investigator of a Volkswagen Foundation Freigeist Grant, based at the Rachel Carson Center, that explores children’s understanding of the natural world in different cultural settings. Francesca is particularly interested in indigenous practices of learning, child moral socialisation, and human-nonhuman relationships. Her research was awarded funding by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Research Council, the Musée du quai Branly, and the National Geographic Society.

RCC Research Project

“The Natural World” and the Shaping of Subjectivity

Selected Publications:

• edited with Jan David Hauck. “Environmental Transformation and Child Socialization in Indigenous South America.” Special issue, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 33, no. 1 (March 2025). www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/saas/33/1/saas.33.issue-1.xml.
• with Gabriel Scheidecker. “Hegemony and Childcare.” aeon, 27 February 2025. https://aeon.co/essays/the-problem-with-parenting-interventions-in-the-global-south.
• “Amazonian Childcare.” aeon, 20 June 2023. https://aeon.co/essays/why-runa-indigenous-people-find-natural-parenting-so-strange.
• “Between Intention and Thought: Individualism and Responsibility in Amazonian Child-rearing.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 3 (2020): 540–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13345.
• “Encountering Supai: An Ecology of Spiritual Perception in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Ethos 46, no. 2 (2018): 275–295.
• “Moving Alike: Movement and Human–Nonhuman Relationships among the Runa (Ecuadorian Amazon).” Social Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2018): 238–252.