Gabriela Cabaña

Gabriela Cabaña is a Chilean sociologist and anthropologist. She is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and researches energy transitions in the context of the ecological crisis. She is currently a researcher at Fundación Tantí and part of the Centro de Análisis Socioambiental.

In her doctoral thesis entitled „Energy as Nature’s Labor: The Ambiguity of Sacrificial Productivism in Chiloé, Southern Chile“, she develops an argument to link the morality of labor and the valorization of energy through the idea of sacrifice. She addresses this research topic against the backdrop of the controversies surrounding renewable energy infrastructures in the Chiloé archipelago. Prior to her PhD, she worked on issues of social policy and the anthropology of the state, as well as natural resource management at the community level. She promotes the debate on Universal Basic Income and degrowth from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. Gabriela Cabaña is a member of the Centre for Socio-Environmental Analysis (CASA), Degrowth London and the Chilean Basic Income Network (part of the Basic Income Earth Network).

Her first publication was in 2017 as co-author of the „Handbook of Anthropology and Media“. Since then, the list already includes ten works that deal with questions of ethics, power relations, emancipatory politics, post-growth and the like. Gabriela Cabaña also teaches regularly at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and, since 2016, at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. There she teaches courses on the global economy, decolonization and resources and visions.

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