Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB). She studied at the UB and at the New School for Social Research in New York, and obtained a MA degree in 1984 and a PhD in 1989. She has received among others a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship for Collaborative Research. She was a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York) and is past President of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA) and past Secretary and Officer of the American Association of Anthropology. She has been invited as Fellow to the Insitute for Advanced Studies, Princeton (2019-2020).  She was a Fellow of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (2014-2016) and was invited professor at the Labex TransferS, Paris, and Hallsworth Visiting Professor, at the University of Manchester (2016). She is co-editor of the European Journal of Sociology.

Research interests

Her most recent project “Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and practice in the pursuit of livelihood” [GRECO] was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant to study the effects of austerity on Southern European livelihoods (2013-2018). A previous project “Addressing the Multiple Aspects of Sustainability: Policy Programs and Livelihood Projects”, funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (2012-15), addressed conflicts emerging around economic, social and environmental crises. As scientific coordinator of a 7FP EU project “Models and their Effects on Development paths” [MEDEA] (2009-12) she explored the impact on ordinary livelihoods of industrial restructuring resulting in two edited volumes published by Routledge. Her present project addresses valuations of life in the globalized economy paying attention to aspects such as taxation worth. Her work is inspired by theories of critical political economy, moral economies, feminist economics, and value regimes. 

Keywords

Economic Anthropology, Informal Economy, Gender relations, Social Reproduction, Crisis