About
Born in Austria, I have been living in Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, since the late 1990s. I co-founded the NGO Amazonlink.org and served as its president from 2001 to 2011. Our work focused on supporting Indigenous communities in protecting their traditional knowledge and on campaigning against biopiracy. Since then, I have been part of a network of civil-society organisations; together we oppose the financialisation of nature and false climate solutions such as REDD.
I hold a Magister degree in philosophy from the University of Vienna and a doctorate in philosophy from a cotutelle programme between the Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC, Brazil) and the University of Klagenfurt (Austria). My dissertation, Capitalist Fantasies of Nature and Dynamics of Foreclosure: A Lacanian Discourse Analysis of the Green Economy, was defended in 2026 and is expected to appear as a book with an academic publisher in 2027. Since 2017 I have taught philosophy at IFAC.
My current research examines how capitalist representations of nature shape environmental and climate policy, both globally and in the Amazon in particular. I am interested in the processes of subjectification and socialisation from which these representations emerge, and in how they might be transformed.
Selected publications
- Schmidlehner, M. F. (2025). Foucaultsche Diskursanalyse mit Lacan: von der Allmacht des Diskurses zur Vielfalt herrschaftlicher und gegenherrschaftlicher Subjektivierungspraktiken. Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, 1, 76–96. doi:10.3262/ZFD2401076
- Schmidlehner, M. F. (2023). The green growth narrative, bioeconomy and the foreclosure of nature. Sustainability Science, 18, 723–. doi:10.1007/s11625-022-01259-z
- Gebara, M. F., Ramcilovic-Suominen, S., & Schmidlehner, M. F. (2023). Indigenous knowledge in the Amazon’s bioeconomy: Unveiling bioepistemicide through the case of Kambo medicine. Forest Policy and Economics, 154, 103012. doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2023.103012
- Schmidlehner, M. F. (2023). Ciclos de violência na Amazônia: uma análise à luz dos conceitos de Violência Extrema e Real do Capital. Instauratio Magna, 3. doi:10.36942/rfim.v3i1.771
- Schmidlehner, M. F., & Alves Neto, F. R. (2020). O avesso da aprendizagem: um ensaio sobre educação, psicanálise e capitalismo. ETD – Educação Temática Digital, 22, 181–201. doi:10.20396/etd.v22i1.8653751
For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar profile or my CV (PDF).
Contact and profiles
- michaelschmidlehner [at] gmail.com
- ORCID
- 0000-0002-8925-3324
- Lattes
- Currículo Lattes (standard Brazilian academic CV)
- ResearchGate
- ResearchGate profile
- Academia.edu
- Academia.edu profile
- CV
- Curriculum vitae (PDF, English)