Dr Mariana Riquito

Mariana Riquito is a postdoctoral researcher in Environmental Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment. As a social scientist, with a focus on environmental anthropology and political ecology, her research explores the ways socioecological transformations are understood and experienced, with particular attention to how such processes affect and are co-constituted through bodies, places, and their more-than-human worlds.

Mariana's research has contributed to critical debates on extractivism, ecofeminism, socioecological conflicts, and the sociopolitics of place. Her work is particularly attentive to the lived, material, affective, and temporal dimensions of socioecological changes, and she is interested in research that emerges from and through emplaced bodily engagements, combining ethnographic, participatory, and sensorial methods.

Prior to joining SoGE in 2026, Mariana completed her PhD at the Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam, with an ethnographic dissertation on the conflict surrounding a prospective lithium mining project in Covas do Barroso, northern Portugal. Her thesis analysed how prospective mining reshaped affective relations, everyday practices, and future imaginaries. It shows how the prospect of extractivism radically reconfigured inhabitants' sense of place and time, while simultaneously renewing their attachment to this place and politicizing their place-based way of life, in a process she conceptualised through the lenses of re-existence.

Mariana is also an affiliated researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, where she is part of the Ecology & Society Lab.

Mariana is a postdoctoral researcher on Living with Drought: Human-Environment Relationships in Drying European Landscapes (funded by ERC Starting Grant No. 101165175), led by Sara Asu Schroer. Working across several European case studies, the project investigates how people and communities learn to live with drought in a rapidly drying world. Together the case studies will explore memories, politics, and future imaginaries of life in drying landscapes, long dominated by large-scale hydrological infrastructures, industrial agriculture, and monocultural forestry. Crucially, this includes paying attention to how drought affects other-than-human life ways, and to the hydro-geo-atmo-ecological processes of drying as they manifest on different spatio-temporal scales. As part of the project, Mariana conducts ethnographic research in Spain’s arid landscapes.