In this inspiring episode of The Enterprise Sessions, Professor Michele Barbour sits down with Dr. Camilla Morelli, a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bristol, whose groundbreaking work with indigenous youth in the Amazon rainforest has taken an unexpected and powerful turn toward enterprise.
What begins as immersive ethnographic research with the Matses people of Peru evolves into a creative collaboration that empowers young people to tell their own stories through animation. Camilla shares how her passion for understanding childhood in rainforest communities led to co-produced films that are now shaping policy, influencing global youth agencies, and opening doors to commercial opportunities.
🎬 Highlights include:
- Camilla’s journey from Rome to Bristol via the Amazon
- The surprising disconnect between rainforest children and their environment
- How digital storytelling became a tool for empowerment and impact
- The challenges and triumphs of entering the creative industries as an academic
- Reflections on gender, entrepreneurship, and finding your voice in unfamiliar spaces
✨ Whether you’re curious about anthropology, creative enterprise, or the power of storytelling, this episode is a must-listen.
🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together a diverse mix of company founders and researchers who talk openly about their personal experiences of forming spin-outs and start-ups, raising capital, academic-industry partnerships and the joys of translating research discoveries into real-world impact. The series aims to inform, inspire and challenge myths and stereotypes about research commercialisation and how businesses and universities can work together to tackle society’s biggest challenges.
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Transcript :
Professor Michele Barbour: Welcome to another Enterprise session from the University of Bristol. My name is Professor Michele Barbour, and today I’m speaking with Dr. Camilla Morelli. And Camilla, I’m really grateful to you for finding time to speak to me. Thank you.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Hi, Michele. Thank you so much. I’m also so, so grateful to be here.
Professor Michele Barbour: Brilliant. Well, I’m really looking forward to diving into your work, your research, and how you’re looking to commercialize and bring that to a wider audience. And I know a little bit about what you do. I know it’s going to be a really exciting sort of story, but let’s maybe kind of look back first of all. So tell me a bit about yourself. Where were you before you were in Bristol? What brought you to Bristol? A little bit about your background.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely. I am a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, and I am Italian, so I grew up in Italy. I studied for my undergraduate degree in anthropology in Rome, and then I did an exchange program in Manchester at the University of Manchester. I fell in love with the British style of university, of academia, and I decided to move here, do a PhD, and then I just stayed. I do research with children and young people, mainly in the Amazon rainforest. So for the past 15 years, I’ve been doing ethnographic fieldwork with them, mainly in Peru and mainly with the Matses, an indigenous group that have a very recent history of contact with national society. And I go there every year. So that’s my absolute passion.
Professor Michele Barbour: Fascinating. Let’s explore that a little bit more. But first of all, I will confess, if pressed, I’m not sure I could deliver a pithy definition of ethnographic research. So for the benefit of ignorant people like me, and I’m sure there are others, what does that mean in simple terms?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yeah, so this is actually—it’s our fault. Anthropologists are not very good at putting out, you know, externally, what we do. So ethnographic means that we—so I am interested in seeing how people live and give meaning to the world. And to do that, I use ethnographic methods, which means that I work with people directly. I ask them questions about what they think about the world, how they see the world, and specifically with children, in my case, and how they live their lives. So it’s an approach where knowledge is generated through engagement with people in the field.
Professor Michele Barbour: That’s enormously helpful. Thank you. And I think a lot of people who aren’t researchers don’t necessarily picture researchers doing that. We think about research on populations or groups of people, but they’re distant from the researcher. Whereas you’re very much hand-in-hand, working, maybe even co-creating some of that research with the individuals. Is that fair to say?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, absolutely. So we are fully immersed in the everyday life of the people that we work with. So the first time I went to the Amazon to do my PhD research, I stayed there for a year in a village with no electricity, no connection. And so I was really fully immersed in that kind of lifestyle. And it was the best year of my life, of course. And I am really committed, like you were saying, to a kind of research that is collaborative. From the outset, especially throughout the years, I’ve developed this approach where I discuss my research projects from the start with my participants, and we see how these projects can benefit them, and then we develop together all the research and the outputs, and we are co-publishing now. So yes, wonderful.
Professor Michele Barbour: It sounds so fascinating. And you mentioned in that last answer that you started this during your PhD. So I suppose a two-part question: why the Amazon rainforest? Of all the places in the world you could have chosen to do your ethnographic research and your PhD, why specifically that area? And then you’re not from there, and you will in many ways be different from the people that you’re trying to engage with. So how does one go about building those relationships, building the trust? Because I’m guessing you need to have a really close relationship with these individuals to actually get what you need and for them to get what they want out of the relationship. So how do you go from “hi, I’m Camilla, nice to meet you” all the way to that really deep, trusting relationship? So the why—the why the place, and the how—how do you do it?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, it’s a really great question. So it started because I was interested—I was really deeply curious and interested to find out how a child grows up in a rainforest environment, how they develop a particular set of ideas, a worldview about themselves, about others, about nature in the rainforest. And I had my own imagination of how these children would be giving meaning to the world. I thought, you live in the rainforest, that’s the best thing ever, right? So I thought these children will be talking about the forest all the time. All the time. And Matses children have a very recent history of contact, as I was saying. So they’re used to living in the forest for generations and they spend most of their lives there. And when I arrived in the field, I very quickly realized that the children were not as interested in the forest as I expected. And especially, they were not as close to the forest, as drawn to it, as their parents and grandparents.
Professor Michele Barbour: Oh, interesting. So at first when you started talking, I wondered if it was because it’s what they know, it’s their environment. It’s a bit like you don’t think about the color of your carpet or your walls too much. So I wondered if it was that familiarity that made it almost not noteworthy. But actually, no, that’s not it. You’re saying that the generational sort of difference—different generations of these peoples feel differently. Is that right?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: A huge intergenerational difference. So for the elders, the forest is everything. The world is the forest. And they still spend most of their time there. Every day they go hunting, they go collecting medicinal plants, foraging plants. But the children don’t share this passion. They were born in a world where the city was already there. Even though most of the children at the time when I started doing research with them had never even seen the city, they knew it was there. And that’s everything they talked about.
Professor Michele Barbour: So they were curious about what they couldn’t see as opposed to what they were seeing every day. They had this wish or need to learn about other places.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: They had glimpses of it because they could go to a kind of town sometimes, maybe once a year. They managed to watch TV, and they just thought that was more desirable, more captivating than the world of the forest. And I was probably part of it too, in a sense, because all of a sudden this woman arrives, and they hadn’t seen many people from Europe, let’s say, at the time. And I brought cameras for them to use, I had a laptop, and I had all this knowledge about the city, and that’s everything they wanted to talk with me about.
Professor Michele Barbour: So you wanted to talk to them about their lives, but they were more interested in your life.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely. They were saying, “Why are you asking me about the forest when we couldn’t?”
Professor Michele Barbour: “This is boring. Tell me about the city.”
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Exactly, Michele. That’s the exact word they used. They said, “The forest is boring.” And they were saying the city is so much fun, and they wanted to know about it. And a lot of people at the beginning started telling me, “Oh, don’t worry. Well, you’ll see, when they grow up, they will decide that actually the forest is better and they will stay.” But throughout the years, I have seen the children actually moving out of the forest and to the city because they had these dreams. And so, you know, Michele, one day a 10-year-old child told me cemento bunquioebi, which in her language means, “I am hungry for concrete.” So these children were just craving the concrete world of the city, and they started moving to the city. In the Amazon, we see a huge migration from forest areas to urban areas. And the problem is that they had an imagination of what life would be that did not match reality.
Professor Michele Barbour: I was wondering that as you were saying, because I guess it’s a version of “the grass is greener,” isn’t it? You know, they know this forest, this place where their parents and grandparents think is wonderful and really is their whole world. They’ve got this imagining of what the glamour and excitement of the city might be. But, goodness me, city life is not all glamorous and exciting. So I guess maybe that didn’t always end well. Did they move back? I mean, I guess. Do you even follow them from that point on?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. So I follow all of them. I follow them very closely. I’m really very invested in their lives. And it was very difficult for most of them because, first of all, as they all told me, “I went to the city, and I thought, I’ll find a job immediately.” And they struggled. A lot of them told me, “When I moved to the city, I didn’t have enough money to buy food, so I couldn’t fall asleep at night because I was just in my bed feeling hungry.” So it’s heartbreaking. Some really heartbreaking stories, but at the same time, also some really hopeful, successful stories that give a very hopeful view of what the future can be for these young people.
Professor Michele Barbour: Okay. Gosh, what a wonderful way of researching and a wonderful world to immerse yourself in.
Professor Michele Barbour: Let’s move forward now, because we’re here to talk about the Enterprise sessions, and indeed, you have been one of my Enterprise Fellows. It’s not immediately obvious at this stage how you would take this wonderful immersive research with these people and convert that into something that has a sort of an enterprise dimension. So maybe let’s bring ourselves a little bit more up to date, because we’ve been talking about your historical work. What was your driver for starting to think in a more entrepreneurial way? What were you trying to achieve, or what opportunity did you see?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yeah, so something that I started doing with this—so when the children started growing up and moving to the city, and then they had become young people, and it was much easier to talk with them, of course, because they were older, to talk with them about the research itself—something I started doing: a key issue that I saw with these children that are moving to the city is that besides the economic hardship, all the challenges, they wanted to tell their stories because they felt that nobody—one day, a young man told me, “I feel as if the world doesn’t know that we exist.”
Professor Michele Barbour: And he’s probably right to a large extent. You know, I have a lot of sympathy for that position.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yeah, absolutely. And so what we started at the same time I started working here at Bristol—and Bristol is an international hub for creative industries, and particularly the animation industry—so I started building these interdisciplinary teams with researchers, indigenous researchers, artists, and animators. And we started co-producing animations with these young people, through which they can tell their stories and share them with others. And we use this for impact as well, because then we work with the government. We use the films that they make to share what their needs are, what their hopes and aspirations are. And we really teach them how to make films from start to finish, to the point that some of them are now making their own films and they’re building a career out of it.
Professor Michele Barbour: And, back to your early point about when some of these young people move to the city, they struggle to find jobs. I would imagine that the sort of skills that are needed in city jobs aren’t always the skills you come with if you’ve grown up in a rainforest. Whereas filmmaking and all of the technological side of that—very marketable skills—as well as the satisfaction of telling their own stories. So it’s almost serving two purposes.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, absolutely. So part of what we are doing now is that we are trying to embed in the school curriculum this kind of digitalization, digital skill transfer. So then these kids will be more prepared, in a sense, for this kind of sector. So what we did is that we produced a lot of animations. They were all non-profit. That had some results. But what we wanted to do next was to turn this endeavor into a commercial kind of enterprise that, again, will benefit primarily the young people in the forest that we work with.
Professor Michele Barbour: So you’ve got this sort of development of this content, working with these young people, and really driven by them. They’ve told you they need to tell their stories. But it’s one thing to create content—we’re creating content right now, aren’t we?—but it’s another thing to draw it to the attention of the people. Either you want them to see it, or they in some way need to see it because they have a responsibility to provide for these young people or are in a position of authority. So having made these animations, how do you then make sure they are seen by people who should see them?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: This actually has been one of the crucial things that the Enterprise Fellowship has been instrumental in helping us develop, because these animations have been seen by policymakers, by the government, by UNESCO, UNICEF, so all these different groups are using them. And actually we are working with some very big youth agencies who are now applying the same approach in their practice. But this remains in the kind of policy sector, which is important, but it’s not everything. We also want to reach the wider public in a way that, again, will benefit these young people, like you were saying. So one key thing that I wanted to learn through this fellowship was how do we reach a broader audience? And I realized that I didn’t have the skills, I didn’t have the knowledge, I didn’t have the contacts. And these are all things that I built throughout the fellowship.
Professor Michele Barbour: So tell me a little bit more about the fellowship. The fellowship scheme’s been run for a few years now, and we have actually had good uptake from the Arts and Humanities, but we never had anyone from an anthropology background do this before. So when you were looking at what you wanted to achieve with working with your young people in the Amazon and you were considering your options, did it feel like a fit because it’s unusual in your discipline? Did you look at this and go, “That’s what I need”? Or did you look at this and think, “Gosh, that’s kind of unfamiliar, but I’ll give it a try”? Like, how confident did you feel?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: It definitely felt like something unfamiliar. But that is a kind of important part of anthropology in itself—delving into the unfamiliar. So that was—
Professor Michele Barbour: It’s familiar to be unfamiliar.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. So I very often kind of thought of parallels between this project and, for example, learning a new language. A new language, but also a new cultural language. Because the creative industry has its own language. And at the beginning, I did not speak it and I did not understand. You know, I found myself in these boardrooms at the beginning with this kind of big names, big people, and I was very fresh. I didn’t really know how things worked. And I feel that in the past couple of years, I have learned that language. So now I think back about those meetings, and now—I know what was going on. Yes, it was definitely something very new. But at the same time, what I saw is that there’s a real appetite in the creative industry to work with anthropologists now, because especially there’s a new generation of filmmakers who want to do things differently. They don’t want to go to a community in the Amazon rainforest, film, go home, and edit. They want to work collaboratively as well.
Professor Michele Barbour: But like you say, you didn’t have the skills initially to engage with the industry, and you learned them. The industry doesn’t have the skills to engage with these indigenous people the way you do as an anthropologist. This is something that is learned over a career. So I guess I can see why that partnership is so important.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. And I feel that it’s been increasingly valued in the creative industries themselves. So we started working with a director who will direct the final product. And we were actually approached by them because they were exactly saying, “We want to develop this new approach, this new way of making TV, of making films, that will start from a collaboration.” And this is the part I’m most excited about, because the young people that will work on what we are making will be credited. They will own part of the rights.
Professor Michele Barbour: So it’s really exciting. Camilla, you and I are both academic entrepreneurs, and in an academic context, that already makes us a little unusual. It’s not as unusual as it was, but most academics aren’t in this sort of enterprise domain. And you and I both are. We’re also both women. And that puts us in an even smaller group, because if we look at people who put themselves forward for these sorts of academic career paths, or who apply for these kinds of funding that we’ve been talking about, there are far more men than women. I wonder, how has that been for you? Have you felt that you’re in a kind of minority, or has it not really touched you? Did it put you off, or did you not really think about it? I’m happy to share my views as well, but how has it been for you?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, absolutely. I absolutely felt that at various stages of the process, in what I’m trying to develop, and the way it made me act is that sometimes it makes me be very defensive because I just assume that—just know—that it’s going to be particularly hard for a woman, even though I belong to an absolutely privileged category of people in the world, for sure.
Professor Michele Barbour: Nevertheless.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. I was surprised, to be honest, to see how in a certain kind of business sector, there are still some gender inequalities that I did not think would be there. Even just in the language that you find in some kind of business training, certain things—it’s language that should change.
Professor Michele Barbour: What do you think? I’ve got a really funny story about that, which I’ll share. I agree. I think I’ve always been quite a contrary person. So when I went on my first entrepreneurial journey, which is more than 10 years ago now—we’re doing this at different times in history almost—but it didn’t put me off. There’s a belligerent side to me that goes, “I’m different from the rest of them. Good. I’ll show them.” That’s just part of my makeup, fine. What surprised me was not that I would find myself in a room with all men. I expected that, and that didn’t inherently trouble me as such. But I think, as academics—I don’t want to generalize too much—but our sector, I think, is quite ahead in terms of equalities, in terms of the language we use, in terms of the assumptions we make, in terms of our policies. I’m not saying we’ve got everything right, but our policies and our processes tend to be quite objective and equitable in comparison to other sectors, such as the ones that you and I were both entering. I was talking to big corporates and companies, and I was also talking a lot to investors. Investors. And if anyone’s going to Google who invested in my company—they were great—but they’re the ones I took the investment from. There was a lot that I didn’t—or that wasn’t offered to me—for reasons that I wonder about. I do have some particular soapboxes that I get on. There was—I had to speak very, very firmly to a company doing some work for my spin-out recently when they kept addressing letters to “Dear Sirs,” which I would just not have. I said, I quote, “The time when we can assume that anyone in a position of power or influence is a man is long behind us.” And I did get a very fulsome apology and assertion that they would do differently another time.
There was also a time when I went to an event at a sort of entrepreneur space in Bristol. It was about fundraising, about different ways to raise money for your company. It was quite funny, because the person training started saying, “Right, put your hands up. We were all representing small companies and startups. Put your hands up if you had money from venture capital firms.” Some of us did, hands up. “What about angels? Hands up. What about European funds? What about Innovate UK? What about crowdfunding? Da da da da.” He lives about eight. I was the only person in the room who had done all of them. I felt like I’d taken a Pokémon approach to it. It starts off, and he’s like, “Gotta catch them all.” And I did. But then he went on in his slide deck to paint a picture—marketing people call it personas, don’t they?—of here are different types of founder and the things they’re likely to do. And straight away, anything that pigeonholes people just gets really on my nerves, even as a principal. But then he painted the conservative: not very bold, tends to be very safe, tends to make very incremental progress, will not give high returns on investment, and those kinds of things.
As a woman in her 50s—here’s Caroline—and here’s this person. And this person is ambitious and dynamic, will be bold, and will make great returns for their investors. Of course, this was James, a man in his 30s. So I kicked off. I put my hand up and I said, “The fact that you are painting these people and these stereotypes—you are part of the problem. You are perpetuating it. It is hard for women.” I wasn’t the only woman in the room, but I was certainly the only one who spoke on that occasion. And in a sense, that’s partly why I did it: everyone in this room needs to hear it, including the women who are already so much in the minority. I said, “By perpetuating this, you are absolutely against progress, and I’m sure you don’t realize it.” I don’t know if they realized it or not, but I told him. It certainly didn’t get a round of applause; it caused a sort of shocked hush in the room. But even if like 10% of the people in the room went away and thought, “Maybe I shouldn’t always use ‘he’ when I’m referring to a CEO. Maybe we shouldn’t always call them the chairman, even if they’re a woman. Maybe I shouldn’t make those assumptions.” Even if one person went away and thought she did have a point there, then I win. I’ll never know if they did or not, but I won because I said what I said. I just called it out.
In a university setting, we’d very rarely uncover that kind of thing these days. When I started off, I’ve been an academic for 20 years, and I remember kicking off in a staff training session when I was a brand-new academic about some stereotypes, where I just felt, “This is really not helpful.” But I don’t see that now, and I think things have moved on a long way. But then, when you put your head above the parapet and you look at the outside world, I think some attitudes towards gender and other protected characteristics are quite far behind our daily life, at least in the way I experience it in an academic setting.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yeah, definitely. I think academia is coming a long way. There are certain very subtle things and issues still. So in my Introduction to Social Anthropology unit, there’s a lecture on Margaret Mead and categories of classification. I did this exercise with my students, first-year students, they just arrived, and I asked them to close their eyes. I say a word, and then they have to picture something. My word is “professor.” Then I ask them what they picture, and they are very, very honest.
Professor Michele Barbour: You know, it’s probably Einstein, right?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: And yeah, it’s like an older white male. And I get them to think about their accent, and they say they speak with the Queen’s English or with the King’s English. Then I say, “Now open your eyes and look at me.” And it’s something else. Yeah. There are things that are still out there, but I think it’s exactly like you say: it’s a matter of the stories we put out there, the images we put out there.
Professor Michele Barbour: It is. And I think—at least you and I exist now. So if students do come in—I’m not an anthropologist, but I might try that with my dental material students—at least we are there doing those things, and they can see that. That’s our privilege, and theirs. In the commercial entrepreneurial world, I think one thing that’s really changed since I started out 11 years ago is there’s now, certainly in Bristol, a really growing community of strong female founders and entrepreneurs. And that helps, because you might be part of a community, you might get together, you might support each other, but partly just because you can see it. Even if it’s not someone you interact with daily, when you get to the office there’s Jenny. Jenny’s awesome. Jenny’s doing really cool stuff. Oh, look. And there’s Annalisa, and she’s so… just being in an environment where there’s more. Gender is only one aspect of diversity. There are many. I do feel we’re further behind in others, but at least there is more representation now than there was when I started out. We’ve still got a long way to go, there’s no denying it.
I went to a really interesting event at Oxford, Brooklyn last year. The aim was to encourage more women to consider becoming angel investors. I wasn’t there in a position to become an investor—we’re academics, we don’t do it for the money—but there were women in the room who were in a position, in theory, to become investors if they wished. And it was more like, was it something that appealed to them? I really appreciated that initiative, because actually it’s not only that women are going to invest in women and men are going to invest in men—it shouldn’t work that way. It does a little bit. It shouldn’t work that way. But we do need diversity at all levels and stages of all these processes. And I find a lot of initiatives that want to address diversity and diversity gaps start with gender, and then can build out to others, maybe less visible, maybe visible but trickier. If you’ve got lots of categories, how do you make sure you’re being inclusive across them? They often start with gender. And yes, it’s a good place to start, I guess.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely, absolutely.
Professor Michele Barbour: Okay, so let’s dig a bit more into the actual content you were creating during this time, because I think a particular focus of yours is climate change, climate breakdown, climate anxiety, and so on. Let’s move from the children telling their stories in a generic sense to tell us a bit more about the specific focus that you developed.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: So initially we started by focusing on climate anxiety. Some of our projects with coastal communities were primarily about climate anxiety. Actually, the broader focus of our work is on children and young people’s views of the future. And the key issue we are addressing is their anxiety towards their adulthood.
Professor Michele Barbour: So climate is a subset of that. But actually, there’s plenty of things for any young person to be anxious about, particularly those in marginalized communities, remote communities, or changing communities.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely. So there is definitely, without a doubt, a youth mental health crisis everywhere. This is partly because children are feeling really anxious about a future that looks increasingly precarious in general. Exactly like you were saying—in vulnerable communities, these children are facing a variety of intersecting issues. So climate anxiety is a part of it. The planet is on fire. Coastal communities are sinking. The Amazon is being destroyed. And the communities I work with in the Amazon, for example, are facing huge threats of heritage loss. The United Nations are saying that by the next century, most of the world’s languages will be forgotten. And so much knowledge is transmitted through these languages. The idea that all this heritage will be left behind is posing a real threat to these young people’s views of the future.
Professor Michele Barbour: So is your primary motivation to address that directly—to try to stop, or do your part to stop that decline and that loss—or is it more to empower the children to do something about it? How directly are you trying to intervene?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: My primary aim is to inspire these children and young people to feel hopeful towards the future and to start working with them to create new narratives. Part of the problem we are addressing is that children and young people everywhere are bombarded with media and public discourses that paint the future as a future of doom. The apocalypse is coming. We need to put new narratives out there. Our goal is to engage children and young people in creating these new narratives—these new stories of hope—while at the same time doing something practical and tangible to help them achieve these futures.
To give you a very tangible example, we engage children in making animations about their desired futures. Some of the animations they produced were about women creating a program of scholarships for women in the villages and then going back and teaching girls about these programs. We are feeding these results to the Ministry of Education in Peru so that tangible action can be taken.
Professor Michele Barbour: Fantastic. So the children—that’s much more immediate than I had imagined. I had imagined almost that a child imagines a future when there’s a teacher that comes to the village and teaches the girls, and then in 10 or 20 years, they become that teacher. Whereas actually this is really real time. They’re imagining something that could have a real impact on their lives. You’re feeding that into the policymakers, and they’re delivering it not long afterwards. So it’s a much quicker feedback loop than I had initially pictured.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, absolutely. For example, we’re also working with UNESCO, and UNESCO is rolling out this huge program teaching children in different parts of the Amazon. They actually asked us to contribute through these animation productions. So then all the children in different parts of the Amazon will be animating, learning digital skills. So in a sense, yes, there’s the long-term view, but there’s also much shorter intervention times.
Professor Michele Barbour: How incredibly satisfying and exciting it must be for you to see that, because you’re an incredibly important bridge.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. That’s kind of my hope: to create this bridge. But then it’s very important for me to create a research context where I am not needed in any way. For example, when we teach them to make animations—and I say “we teach them,” but it’s the animators in the team who teach them—they do it in a way that the children and young people learn how to make these films with resources they have from start to finish. What is very interesting is that we leave, and they keep messaging us and sending us the videos that they make after we have left. It’s a project that keeps going by itself.
Professor Michele Barbour: There’s almost your redundancy built in, isn’t there? My job here is done, Mary Poppins style.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: But also what’s interesting is that they become hugely better and more successful than us. This group of people we work with—they made these animations with us and then got a grant from the government to make a feature film by themselves. It’s their work.
Professor Michele Barbour: Incredible.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. Because, obviously, like you asked me before, a question about being someone who comes from outside and wants to do things—which is always very delicate and politically complicated, and there are all sorts of problems with people who have done really bad work in the past.
Professor Michele Barbour: In this sense.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: What I think is important is that for someone who works in the UK, has access to certain resources and skills, it’s very important to share them with others, to have this equitable world in mind. Like you’re saying, in the longer-term future, this is really all I’m doing: I want to share this with these children and young people that I’ve known for a long time and that I know they can benefit from it.
Professor Michele Barbour: What sort of scale are we talking about? I mean, when you’re talking about these children, young people you’ve built these amazing bonds with over the years, how many? Tens, hundreds? What’s the sort of scale of the operation?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: It’s becoming more and more so. At the beginning of my research, when I started, I worked in a village of 200 people, and most of them were children. So there were a lot of children, but still it was a relatively small number. Then we started getting bigger grants and working with more people. The key thing is that what we are doing now is training some Amazonian teachers who will then train other children. So, we are looking at—well, we will have nothing to do with it; the project will just keep going. So we are looking at, yes, hopefully many—like big, big numbers.
Professor Michele Barbour: Forgive me, but you know, I have a commercial mindset. I’m thinking this sounds like a franchise operation. Sounds like your approach is training local teachers, who then train those children, and some of them will become local teachers themselves, and so on.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, yes, absolutely. And some of these teachers in training, I am now acting as their remote mentor. They will write their dissertations on these projects. One beautiful story we have is that one of these children, who was dreaming of concrete 15–20 years ago, has now moved to the city and started studying anthropology. His name is Roldan. He graduated and became the first anthropologist in his whole society.
Professor Michele Barbour: Oh, how incredible.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Which is amazing. We met at the beginning because he was a participant in my pilot project, funded by the Brigstow Institute—a total pilot where we were trying animation for the first time in co-production. He took part as a participant; he was brilliant. Then I got a grant from the British Academy, so we hired him as a research assistant. Because the pandemic happened, he had to do most of the data collection, which was incredible, and he was amazing. Now we’ve just co-published an article together in a really, really good journal, and he’s doing a PhD in anthropology in Brazil. So he is the future—the hopeful future of anthropology that we have.
Professor Michele Barbour: Ah. Oh, that’s glorious to have inspired that. And you must reflect on that quite personally, because there’s the sort of cliché, right? You’re an anthropologist, you go there, and one of your young people sees that as something he thinks he can do too. And indeed, he is doing it.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. And he’s doing it so much better. He’s going to become hugely more successful than me, of course. We shared the methodology; we developed it together. Last year he got a grant as a principal investigator to use this animation co-production in his own project. Then they showed us what they did in the Amazon with these animations they made. They were incredible. So they’re really becoming, yes, hugely successful. It’s great to see.
Professor Michele Barbour: That’s wonderful. Having spent so long working in the Amazon, do you ever look at other parts of the world and think, could I have a similar impact for other communities who are equally in need but maybe don’t have access to what you’ve brought to this community?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Sometimes people contact me from other places and ask, “Do you want to come and do this project here?” For us, the question is always about funding. But if someone approaches me and asks, “Can you share your methodology with us?”—absolutely. This is something that should be shared with others.
Professor Michele Barbour: You want to do it. You’re committed to the Amazonian communities; you’re not tempted to go somewhere else in the world.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: We’ve done work in different places, and yes, in the future we will work in other locations. I do have a very close, personal relationship specifically with the children I’ve worked with. They’re not children anymore, but for me, in a sense, some of them will forever be children. I’ve worked with them for so long. An amazing thing happened just two days ago: I got a phone call from a good friend of mine from the village where I did my PhD research, which is really remote and has no connection. I thought, “Oh, maybe he’s gone to the city,” but he never travels to the city. I thought, “This is interesting.” I called him back via video call, and he was calling me from the village—they put an Internet connection there. So in the past week, I’ve gotten so many messages from people there, saying, “Hey, how are you?” The kids are sending me messages. It’s amazing.
Professor Michele Barbour: How do the older generations feel, both about what you’re doing and about that incursion of tech into their world? Because I can see how the kids, from everything you’ve told me, are probably thinking this is brilliant. But what about their parents and grandparents? How do they feel about it?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: That’s a really interesting point, Rinselle. When I first arrived, I saw an intergenerational difference in reaction toward me. Everybody really welcomed me from the start. The children thought my knowledge and skills—using a laptop—were the best thing ever. But the elderly people, not really. They thought people like me were pretty useless because we couldn’t…
Professor Michele Barbour: You know, we can track. Exactly. Exactly.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: They really looked after me because they knew I couldn’t move through the Amazon skillfully by myself. But it’s not that they admired my skills or thought using a laptop was impressive. It’s not particularly great.
Professor Michele Barbour: Well, in their lives, I guess at that stage they hadn’t seen that it could do anything for them—like, why is this a useful skill?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Exactly. But over the years, especially with this animation work, things have changed. One incredible thing that happened is I started traveling to the Amazon with my collaborator, who’s a Bristol-based animator. One day, the elders approached us and said, “You have to do a project for us.” They said that an amazing thing in the Amazon is its mythology, which tells a different story about people and nature. This is not just fantasy; from an Amazonian perspective, it merges with history. It’s real. But it’s getting lost because young generations are not learning these myths. The elders were concerned, and they saw how much the kids loved working with us—they really adore it. They said, “Why don’t you make animations about these myths so the kids will finally learn them? Maybe they don’t listen to us, but they will watch them on their phones.”
Professor Michele Barbour: It’s a great growth mindset from those individuals, isn’t it? What we’ve done for generations, as in oral traditions of telling these myths, isn’t working. But here’s a new technology—if that’s even a word they might have used—rather than being hostile, let’s use it to achieve our ends: making sure our kids and grandkids know these myths.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely brilliant.
Professor Michele Barbour: Did you do it?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, we did. We had some British Academy funds, and we created these myths. Part of this is now the basis of the project pitch we’ve developed as part of the Enterprise Fellowship. There are two parts of the project: we will train the children and young people in animation-making, and our director will also train them in filmmaking. All this training will then be something they can use themselves and keep going.
Professor Michele Barbour: And all the while, they’re soaking up these myths from their parents and grandparents, maybe without even realizing it.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Absolutely.
Professor Michele Barbour: Yeah.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: When we did this project, I asked all the kids about these myths, and they didn’t know them. By the end, everybody was talking about the myths. It was really cool. And it’s an idea that came from them—it didn’t come from us.
Professor Michele Barbour: Yeah, it’s brilliant. Fantastic. All the better. So tell me a little bit more about the commercial dimension. You started making these videos, films, and animations, but you wanted to make this more of a commercial endeavor. How did you start that? You said you found yourself in boardrooms. How did you get in? Who were you talking to, and how has it been received? How’s it gone so far?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Bristol, I feel, is an international center for creative industries, but it’s also small. Something I noticed is that in the creative industries, contacts are everything. We built on the few contacts we had to approach different people. I’m not going to name anyone, of course.
Professor Michele Barbour: No, of course not. I suppose I’m asking because people might be inspired by this and think, how do I get from there to here? How did you reach the people you needed to reach? How did you identify them?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Great question. At the beginning, I had no idea of the hierarchy—who was who. But I wasn’t afraid to contact people. We just contacted everyone we knew. Then we asked each of them for introductions. That’s how it happened. Over time, we networked, built contacts, and some people started approaching us. That was fantastic, because finally, some people knew who we were and what we were doing. The next step was realizing we needed a team. My collaborator and I couldn’t do the whole thing ourselves. So we built a team: my collaborator (an animator), Roldan (the math researcher in the Amazon), Guillermo (an illustrator in the Amazon), my friend Cindy (an Amazonian woman supporting the project), and a film director. The key thing was producing the project, and having producers on our side was a major achievement.
Professor Michele Barbour: Let me be clear—throughout this process, when you’re reaching out to people and, if it’s not the right person, they refer you on—what’s your offer and what’s your ask? Is your offer that you can enable them to co-produce films and animations with indigenous populations in the Amazon that they couldn’t access otherwise, providing meaningful collaboration? And your ask is: come do this with us, fund some of this work, or share it with a wider audience to generate income so you can perpetuate it? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m trying to understand your commercial offer and ask.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. What we offer is a series of things: a particular approach based on co-production, creative ideas, relationships, collaborations. The creative industries seem keen to do things differently, so they like that. They also really value ideas based on 15 years of research I’ve done.
Professor Michele Barbour: They value the research behind it—a really solid foundation.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, yes. And what we ask is partly funding, but also the production and distribution of the product, which is completely beyond me. This is what I realized through the fellowship—we could only do this with people in the industry.
Professor Michele Barbour: What’s your dream for where this could go? Where do you want these animations most of all? The watershed? The British Museum?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: My number one dream is a screening in the community.
Professor Michele Barbour: Yes.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: I want to gather the whole community, have a massive cinema-style film screening, maybe even bring popcorn, and have a cinema night in the middle of the Amazon. That’s my number one dream.
Professor Michele Barbour: That would be incredible. But thinking back to the original conversation with one of the children who wanted his story to reach a wider audience, where do the young people want their story to be heard? Do they want it in particular parts of the world or for particular audiences, like politicians?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: The young people want the general public to access it. While my dream is the community cinema, our aim is also distribution through major networks. That’s why having producers on our team is key—they regularly sell their work to major networks. That will be exciting for the young people.
Professor Michele Barbour: To show their stories on Netflix or similar platforms.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes, and also on Peruvian networks, because it’s important for them to see it on those platforms.
Professor Michele Barbour: Wonderful. Zooming out a bit—you’re from anthropology, part of arts and humanities research. When I started the Enterprise Fellowship, the prevailing view was that uptake would come from science, engineering, or health sciences, and that arts and humanities wouldn’t engage. That was emphatically wrong. You’re an example of that. Do you have a view of why that is? Why arts and humanities researchers now approach this commercially?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: There’s a huge need and desire among us to do something with our research. I’ve changed too. At the beginning, I was happy to go to the Amazon, gather data, and write a book. Now, I’m not happy with that alone. I need to see my research have an impact in the world. More people are pushed by this need—to show how research is useful, important, and to make a difference. Children and young people everywhere see a future that seems doomed. We want to do something about that—to make sure our research can change it.
Professor Michele Barbour: So your entrepreneurial approach is a means to an end. It’s not about wanting to become an entrepreneur and make lots of money. It’s about having real, lasting impact through your research.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: Yes. If I have to be honest, I’m probably the worst entrepreneur in history. Money doesn’t drive me. What drives me is helping the young people I work with have better livelihoods and income. For myself? I’m an academic. That’s what drives me. And from the start, I told the director I would only make the film if the community had part of the rights. These aren’t projects to make anyone rich. Everyone involved works at hugely reduced rates. Hopefully, once these stories are out there, anyone who sees them and wants to help can do so.
Professor Michele Barbour: I don’t think your description of yourself as the worst entrepreneur is accurate. It’s just that you pick and choose the aspects of entrepreneurial behavior you adopt—you don’t have to take all of them.
Professor Michele Barbour: Camilla, you have such an incredible story and deep connection with these people. It’s apparent in everything you say. Looking back to when you started in Rome with your anthropology degree, if young Camilla could see where you are and what drives you now, what would she think?
Dr. Camilla Morelli: I hope she’d be happy. Actually, she might be a bit overwhelmed, maybe surprised. To me, this was an absolute dream. I come from a country that isn’t doing particularly great. My peers who stayed weren’t able to follow or achieve their dream jobs. I mean, it’s a sunny country, but still…
Professor Michele Barbour: It has its appeal, but it’s really hard. You’ve left family and your country of birth, but you haven’t limited your opportunities—you’ve made them. You mentioned she’d be surprised.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: She would be speechless. I remember feeling it like it happened 10 minutes ago—when I was on a plane over the Atlantic going to do my PhD fieldwork. I couldn’t believe I was doing what Margaret Mead and Malinowski had done, and that someone was supporting me. I felt so lucky, so privileged. I was just a girl from rural Tuscany. I didn’t think I’d ever have this chance. That’s why it’s important that others have the chance too.
Professor Michele Barbour: I couldn’t agree more. I think you’re still that girl. Everything you say about your work shows that you can’t quite believe how fortunate you are to have this impact. It’s a wonderful attitude—it keeps you driven. I’ve enjoyed this discussion so much. It’s wonderful to dive into your work and that deep passion you have for it. Thank you so much for sharing your story.
Dr. Camilla Morelli: This was fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting me.
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