About
I am a researcher working on regional development, Amazonia, resource extraction, climate governance and the institutional conditions of societal transformation.
My academic work has developed over several decades through research, teaching, project coordination and applied studies in Brazil and in international cooperation. A major geographical focus has been the Brazilian Amazon, where I have worked on questions ranging from mining and regional transformation to public policy, coastal development, extractive communities and climate governance.
My current research is organized around the programme Regional Development in World Society (RWS). The programme asks how global societal processes acquire territorially specific forms and how these configurations shape the possibilities and limits of regional development.
RWS draws primarily on social systems theory and theories of world society while remaining in dialogue with regional development theory, political economy, development theory and society–nature approaches.
Research Focus
My current work concentrates on four closely connected areas:
- regional development and world society
- mining and extractive transformations
- society–nature relations and climate governance
- institutions, organizations and public intervention
Across these fields, I am interested in how processes that operate at global or transregional scales become connected to particular territories through organizations, knowledge, measurement, finance, infrastructure and governance.
A recurring question is why similar global processes generate very different regional trajectories.
Amazonia as a Comparative Observation Field
Amazonia has been a central empirical field throughout much of my academic work.
Rather than treating Amazonia as a homogeneous region, I use it as a comparative observation field in which different forms of regional transformation can be examined.
Important observation sites include:
- mining municipalities in southeastern Pará,
- the coastal zone of northeastern Pará and the Zona Bragantina,
- extractive and coastal communities,
- Manaus and the Zona Franca,
- and territories affected by changing relations between resource extraction, conservation, infrastructure and public policy.
These settings make visible the interaction between global economic processes, ecological conditions, organizational structures and historically accumulated regional trajectories.
Regional Development in World Society
The current theoretical focus of my work is Regional Development in World Society (RWS).
The programme starts from the premise that modern society cannot be adequately understood as a collection of territorially bounded societies. Economic, political, scientific, legal, financial and technological processes increasingly operate within a world-societal horizon.
Regions nevertheless remain highly differentiated.
RWS therefore asks how regional configurations emerge within world society.
Its central proposition is:
Regions emerge as historically contingent configurations in which heterogeneous world-societal processes become selectively connected, organizationally stabilized, materially conditioned and institutionally condensed.
This perspective is developed through concepts such as selective territorialization, regionalization, organizations and regional structures, knowledge and decision relevance, materiality, and regional capacities and asymmetries.
Research and Applied Work
My academic trajectory combines theoretical research with empirical and applied work.
This has included research on:
- mining and regional transformation,
- small-scale and industrial resource extraction,
- regional and municipal public policy,
- environmental and social governance,
- climate adaptation and coastal resilience,
- gender and cooperative organization,
- mobility and urban development,
- and evaluation of development interventions.
Applied projects are important not because they provide direct applications of a single theory, but because they expose concrete problems of coordination, institutional capacity, inequality and regional transformation.
They therefore form part of the broader research genealogy from which my current theoretical work has developed.
Teaching and Supervision
Teaching and academic supervision are closely connected to my research.
I have worked with students and researchers on topics related to:
- regional development,
- sustainable development,
- Amazonian transformations,
- extractive industries,
- environmental governance,
- public policy,
- institutions,
- and society–nature relations.
Supervision also provides an important space for developing comparative empirical research and for testing new analytical questions.
International and Interdisciplinary Work
My research has developed through collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
The questions I work on require dialogue between sociology, regional development studies, political economy, environmental studies, public policy and related fields.
International cooperation has also been important for examining how concepts, standards, funding mechanisms and policy models circulate between different institutional and regional contexts.
Photography
Photography is another part of my work.
Some of my photographic projects are closely connected to research settings and document landscapes, infrastructures, environmental change and everyday life in regions undergoing transformation.
Other photographs are independent of specific research projects.
The Photography section therefore complements the academic sections of this website without being reduced to research documentation.
This Website
This website brings together several dimensions of my work:
Research presents my current research programme and empirical fields.
Projects documents concrete research and applied projects.
Publications provides access to my academic publications.
Teaching & Supervision presents selected teaching and supervisory activities.
Ideas provides access to conceptual notes, theoretical building blocks, theoretical dialogues and the open theory agenda.
Photography presents visual work connected to research and other contexts.
Together, these sections document both the continuity of my academic trajectory and the ongoing development of my current research agenda.
Contact
Armin Mathis
Universidade Federal do Pará — UFPA
Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos — NAEA
Belém, Pará, Brazil
ORCID →
Explore
Research →
Projects →
Ideas →