Sandra Rodríguez Castañeda

Toxic Reproduction Beyond the Flesh: Intimate Geographies and Histories of Extraction in Peru

Principal supervisor: Professor Paulo Drinot, UCL Institute of the Americas. 
Subsidiary supervisor: Dr Enrique Castañón Ballivián, UCL Institute of the Americas. 
 

My PhD research aims to advance discussions on the interplay between reproduction, environment and power, by investigating the reproduction of life in the toxic geography of Cerro de Pasco - a historic mining site in Peru and a pivotal node of racial capitalism in the Americas. As centuries of mining manifest in bodily and territorial toxic devastations, residents grapple with anxieties about the health and reproduction not only of humans but of a range of living systems. Focusing on the intimate domains of body, emotion and home, this research combines ethnographic methods (interviews and participant information), visual methodologies and archival work, to account for how residents sense and experience the toxins’ mobilities across scales, how this influences the reorganisation of the labour needed to sustain life, and how it guides their politics of engagement with or resistance to the mine.

The research contributes to nascent interdisciplinary theorizations of the interplay between reproductive politics and environmental politics, commonly understood as distinct areas of inquiry. It also sheds new light on the study of extractivism, capitalism, and environmental degradation. Besides its academic relevance, foregrounding the relationships between reproduction, environment and power can be productive to build coalition politics across social movements in this and other damaged worlds.

PhD funding

• UCL Research Excellence Scholarship

Education

• Bachelor in Anthropology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2012
• MPhil in Geographical Research, University of Cambridge, 2020

Awards | Grants | Scholarships 

• 2024: UCL Research Excellence Scholarship
• 2023: Award from the Bienal Internacional de Radio (Gobierno de México) for obtaining the second prize of best journalistic podcast in Latin America.
• 2022:  ODA Grant ‘Taking Care: A documentary film about abortion care practices in Peru’ (with Cordelia Freeman as Principal Investigator and CLIM).
• 2022: WCCEH Transformative Research Award ‘Emotion, politics and protest: Visualising political mobilisation and resistance in Peru’ (with Cordelia Freeman as Principal Investigator).
• 2022-4: Research Grant, Concurso Anual de Investigación, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Organización política y cultura visual en el Perú: (auto)representación, nuevas subjetividades sociales y luchas políticas (1968-1992), (with Mijail Mitrovic, Mauricio Godoy and Julio González)
• 2022:  Photography Project Grant, ECO/22 Convocatoria, Vist Projects, ¿Quién cuida la semilla?: Cuerpo, comunidad y territorio en el Cerro Quilish” (with José Isabel Ayay, Leslie Searles and Francisco Vigo as Colectivo Semilla).
• 2019: 'Presidente' Scholarship awarded by the Peruvian government studies. 

Publications

• 2024    Freeman, C., Rodríguez, S. The Making of Clandestinity: Strategic Ignorance in Abortion Practices in Latin AmericaInternational Journal of Politics 26(3): 633-656.
• 2023    Freeman, C., Rodríguez, S. The chemical geographies of misoprostol: Spatializing abortion access from the biochemical to the global, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 113(7): 1535-1542.  
• 2023    Duffy, D., Freeman, C., Rodríguez, S. Building infrastructures of abortion care in an un-caring state: acompañante’s carework and abortion access in Peru, Signs 48(3): 585-608.  
• 2019    Damonte, G., Ngaji, T., Kirimi,L, Rodríguez, S. Land Tenure and Sustainability of Pastoral Production Systems: A Comparative Analysis of the Andean Altiplano and the East African Savannah. Nomadic Peoples 23(1): 28-54. Available here.
• 2016    Barrio de Mendoza, R., Rodríguez, S. Las fronteras de la hoja de coca: Entendiendo la cadena informal de comercialización de la hoja de coca para el consumo tradicional en Cusco. In Durand, F., Urrutia, J. Y Yon, C. (eds), Perú: El Problema Agrario en Debate. SEPIA XVI. Lima: SEPIA.
• 2012    Rodríguez, S. ¿De quién es el bosque? Reflexiones en torno a los bienes comunes y la autoridad en la comunidad campesina Lurinzayacc y Ananzayacc, Ayacucho. In Diez, A. (ed.), Tensiones y Transformaciones en Comunidades Campesinas. Lima: CISEPA. 

Audiovisuals

• 2023    “Mientras todo iba pasando”, shortfil co-directed with Arón Nunez-Curto, produced by Colectiva por la Libre Información para las Mujeres.
• 2023  Trama. A three episodes mini-serie about how three women experienced the mercury spill caused by Minera Yanacocha in Cajamarca, Perú.  
• 2023  “Seeds, bodies and territory in Cerro Quilish”, Photoessay in Forge Magazine.
• 2022    “Cruzando fronteras: transformaciones, cuerpo y territorio en el Cerro Quilish” (as Colectivo Semilla), Vist Project, Eco 2022.