I am an Anthropology Ph.D. student at Rice University. Originally from Valencia, Spain, I hold Spanish degrees (Licenciatura) in Law, Humanities, and Anthropology. After graduating in Law at Universidad Cardenal Herrera–CEU (Valencia) in 2001, I worked as a lawyer for three years at the firm Uría Menéndez. In 2005 I was selected by ICEX (the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade) for its international training program, as a part of which I received a Master’s degree in International Business Administration and spent the next two years working as a market analyst in New York. Upon returning to Spain, I graduated from University of Valencia with a Master’s degree in Cooperation for Development (2009) and with a degree in Humanities (2011), which included academic exchanges at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). My Master’s thesis comparatively examined the policies of support of cooperativism in Latin America and Spain. After moving to Barcelona in 2010, I graduated in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2012 and was subsequently awarded a Fulbright grant to conduct graduate studies in Anthropology in the United States.

With the support of the Fulbright grant, I joined Rice Anthropology in the fall of 2013. In my current dissertation project, I am conducting ethnographic research in Barcelona with the Solidarity Economy and the commons movements, which aim to transform society by constructing alternative economic structures — cooperative, democratic, ethical, ecologically respectful, and, ultimately, post-capitalist. While these movements center on the everyday practice of cooperative ways of being and relating otherwise, I focus particularly on the concomitant practices of critical reflection and knowledge-making through which Solidarity Economy and commoning are constructed as an alternative political paradigm, as well as the modes of expertise and intellectual authority enacted in them. My research thus interrogates the interplay between transformative practice, theoretical reflection and knowledge production, and the expansion of the political and democratic imagination.