Contact Us

We are a group of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty. Feel free to email any of us if you want to get to know more about our working group activities or want to know more about our research projects.

Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis (srubianogalvis@usfca.edu). He is a researcher and educator working at the intersection of critical environmental social sciences and science and technology studies. In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management with an emphasis on Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, he is a Gerardo Marín Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Francisco's International Studies Department and a Research Affiliate of the Human Contexts and Ethics of Data Program at UC Berkeley's Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. His work studies the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and data in Latin America.

Jesús Alejandro García A (alejo_garcia@berkeley.edu). Alejo Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. His research examines the amphibious politics of capital in the Upper Magdalena River basin, Colombia, with particular attention to how riverine populations experience and contest capital’s attempts to stabilize, disrupt, or rework land-water interfaces. His research sits at the intersection of the political economy of terraqueous territorialities, agrarian political ecology, and environmental justice. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Economics.

Ángela Castillo-Ardila (angelacastillo@berkeley.edu). She is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an anthropologist of environmental politics and resource extraction struggles with an emphasis on Latin America. Situated at the intersection of political anthropology, environmental justice, and legal studies, her work broadly asks how human groups reshape landscapes, political subjectivities, and human-nature relations in extractive contexts. Her current research project, Defending Territory, Water, and Life: Unsettling Mining Frontiers in Colombia, is an ethnographic study of how anti-mining coalitions stopped the La Colosa, a large-scale gold mining project in Colombia. It examines land and water defense practices to better understand the coalitional dimensions of disrupting contemporary forms of natural resource extraction.

Andrés Julián Caicedo Salcedo (andresc@berkeley.edu). He is a doctoral student in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Program (emphasis on Society and Environment) at the University of California, Berkeley.

María Villalpando Páez (mariavillalpando@berkeley.edu). She is a doctoral student at the Energy and Resources Program at the University of California, Berkeley. María is interested in exploring rural and peasant women’s role in the advancement of food sovereignty and in understanding the complex negotiation processes between communities, individuals, and the environment in rural and agricultural communities in Mexico. Her work is motivated by the possibility of co-envisioning pathways for smallholder farmers’ well-being in her home country, Mexico, and in finding ways to articulate different worldviews in search for equitable and just rural livelihoods. More info: https://erg.berkeley.edu/people/villalpando-paez-maria/