– Which research projects are you most preoccupied with?
– I’ve just completed a book manuscript that presents a political theory of finance based on a long-term ethnography accompanying the lives of Latin-American migrants in Spain. It traces how a particular engagement with credit and debt practiced in Ecuador helped open a new political horizon for Spanish activists fighting for the right to housing in Europe. It contributes to current anthropological debates on decoloniality, democracy, and financial capitalism.
– I’m also starting a new position in January 2027 in the Netherlands at the Meertens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and the University of Amsterdam, where I’ll be working on the digitalization and financialization of greenhouse agriculture in southern Spain. As the digitalization of agriculture intensifies and ideas of sustainable AI gain traction, governments, businesses, and universities have begun investing in new data sources and high-performance computing. My new project examines how such digital investments and economies are transforming agricultural landscapes, rural livelihoods, and multispecies relations.
– What do you hope to find out?
– With the book I hope to contribute to an ongoing discussion in Europe and beyond on the affordability of housing and the crisis of democracy. I’ve been part of a social movement for the right to housing in Spain called the PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca) for the past decade and a half. Together, we’ve written various reports and participated actively across Europe in social organizing but also in policy recommendation at the local level in Spain and at the European Union. The book is part of many of these conversations that hope to have an impact beyond academia.
– In the new project, I’m interested in the growing prominence of AI in agricultural economies. I’m looking at “green by design” projects that create the conditions for AI extractivism, namely the articulation of speculative finance, computing power, and policy innovation. By ethnographically looking at the implementation of Spain’s newly developed Green Algorithms National Program, I hope to show the rapid transformation of agriculture and the multiple processes informing sustainability discourses in the 21st century.
– Why is this important?
– We need to understand that housing is at center of the polycrisis situation we are living through right now; including the crises in finance, democracy, and ecology. It has also become a multigenerational affordability problem. While there are clear differences on housing across Europe, my findings show how global financial powers have transformed housing into an asset that defines our livelihoods and future. There are clear political choices that our governments need to make going forward in deciding whether housing is a right or if it becomes a speculative privilege.
– AI-driven agriculture raises several interconnected concerns, each equally pressing. Ecologically, AI systems consume significant resources, and they are being implemented in southern Spain, one of the country’s regions most severely affected by drought. In terms of labor, the human consequences remain little studied. A new far-right government in Andalucía has emerged alongside technologies that promise human-less agriculture, and the effects on migrants, who are already in precarious employment and housing, are not yet being studied. To me, this is urgent research. There is also the need to understand how our food systems in a region known as “Europe’s farm” are affected by digital “efficiency” as they cannot be unlinked from multinational data control, technological dependencies and failures, and human and their non-human consequences (whether intended or not).
– Who are you collaborating with?
– The book grows out of long-term collaborations with activist circles and my work with Latin American migrants, particularly from Ecuador, where I am also from.
– Both the book and the new project on AI and agriculture project are connected to Kaleidos, an ethnography-based, and STS-inspired research center I co-founded at the University of Cuenca in Ecuador, where I still hold a visiting position. A number of my current projects build on work I started there, particularly in multimodal research. This cross-disciplinary approach runs through my work and links arts and film-based production, critical digital data studies, and public-facing, committed forms of research and communication.
– The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), where I served as executive board council member (2021-2023) has continued to be a space of transnational collaboration linking my work in Ecuador and Norway to Turkey, Spain, the US, Mexico, and the Netherlands.
– What do you look for when choosing collaborators?
– After more than a decade of multimodal work, I’ve learned to look for collaborators who are open-minded collaborators and who enjoy what they do, even when it’s hard to do it. I firmly believe in decentralizing knowledge. For me, this means designing and conducting decolonial research that responds to the needs of local communities, an approach I’ve written about as “responsive scholarship.” It also means learning to think about the world we live in in radically different ways. My collaborators share these commitments and look for ways to produce knowledge that serves the academic community while also reaching well beyond it.
- Link to article on responsive scholarship: A Revelatory Pandemic: Crisis, Agency, and COVID in Latin America
– Who is this research relevant for outside of academia, and what do you do to ensure they make use of your research?
– I’ve touched on this in earlier answers, but the research I’ve co-produced has been used by social movements, journalists, policymakers, and the general public. What makes this possible is collaboration, and a commitment to directing research resources such as funding, time, academic access, or laboratories toward resource-poor communities, where conducting research at all is often nearly impossible. As someone born and raised in the Global South, I’m well aware of what this means in the day-to-day life of academic institutions in many of our countries.
– To make research knowledge more open and accessible, I have co-designed digital platforms, visual and graphic outputs, comic books, podcasts, films, and public exhibits, alongside co-authored academic publications.
– Do you have any examples of your research being used outside of academia?
– The digital platform I co-created, EthnoData, is a good example. It continues to be used by people studying violent deaths, missing persons, and feminicides in Ecuador. It is also cited as an example of ethnographic experimentation in the critical study of statistical data.
- Links: EthnoData
Links to academic articles:
- Teaching the Politics of Numbers with EthnoData: Ethnographic Experimentations through Statistics in Ecuador
- How to produce responsive ethnography of data
– Another example that bridges academic and non-academic spaces is the annual public ethnographic exhibits I’ve curated for the past four years. Students in an advanced research methods course in the MA program in anthropology develop multimodal projects instead of a final written exam, as part of their preparation for conducting six months of fieldwork.
– Students’ creative projects have included short films, dance performances, board games, original songs, paintings, photographic montages, queer party rooms, clothing swaps, poems, sculptures, collages, zines, physical models, and curated music lists. These projects create intergenerational and multilingual dialogues, they cut across rural, urban, and transnational boundaries, and they experiment with a variety of formats, bringing into the center stage of our redefined classroom many kinds of expertise, often not considered academic. The result is transformative for students and those who attend the exhibit.
– What other research projects are you involved in?
– I’m one of the co-convenors of Colleex network, EASA’s Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation. The space brings together people interested in forms of research that fall outside the methods and outputs more commonly used in academia. It’s a great place to learn, share, and design new ways of doing and engaging with research and we’re planning a number of very interesting events for 2027.
- Link: Colleex
– What do you think is the most interesting aspect of being a researcher?
– For me, as an anthropologist, doing research means understanding the world from the perspectives of the people I work with. It requires an intellectual flexibility that keeps us sharp as we design our methodologies, change the ways we see the world, and develop new knowledges that enter our classrooms. Doing research also means speaking truth to power, and being able to do this alongside some of the most generous, ingenuous, and good-hearted people I’ve met in Spain and Ecuador is one of the greatest privileges of being a researcher. If we put our knowledge at the service of these struggles, I think we still have a chance to fight the extractive, dispossessive, and impoverishing aspects of what we call capitalism today.
– As my late advisor, David Graeber, used to say,
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
– To be a researcher, for me, is to help make that difference.