Paula Escribano

Paula Escribano is a postdoctoral researcher working at the  Grup d’Estudis sobre Reciprocitat (GER) at the University of Barcelona. where she leads (in colaboration with Seth Holmes) the line of research about “Food Systems”. She  is also Member of the Coordination Team/Steering Committee of the Safeguarding Plan for the conservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Cañadas Reales in Spain, together with Pablo Domínguez and Patricia Mora. Paula works for the Ministry of Culture as an anthropologist for the elaboration of the safeguarding plan.

Paula’s research explores livelihood strategies and regulatory frameworks in rural settings. More specifically, she focuses on the impact of state over-regulation, neoliberal policies and environmental conservation efforts on short food production and distribution chains. Her data collection is primarily based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews. She is currently the IP of the project “Ruralities in transition. An audiovisual proposal on the impact of e-learning in the generation of responses to eco-social tensions in rural territories in Catalonia” funded by Joan Oro Fundation and participates as a researcher on the projects ‘Valuable food, essential workers, vulnerable people and social responses to crisis: food provisioning systems during the COVID-19 pandemic (FOOD-Pan)’ (PI: Susana Narotzky (UB), (2021-2023) PID2020 -114317GB-I00)

Paula won the scholarship Juan de la Cierva (2021_2023) leading the research project ‘Livelihood strategies, neoliberalism and environmental values’, funded by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. She has been a visiting researcher at the Political Ecology Group in the Institute of Social Sciences, Netherlands. From 2015 to 2021, Paula taught several courses on Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). These included Ethnographic Reading Seminars, Critical Theory Seminars, Sex/Gender Classification Systems, Qualitative Methodology and several courses on Economic Anthropology, among others. From 2021 to 2023 she is teaching at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona.

Paula was awarded a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology by UAB in July 2020, with the thesis «Back-to-the-land» in Catalonia: an anthropological perspective’. Her master’s thesis explored an ecovillage in post-socialist Hungary, where she lived for a year. Paula has taught courses on Economic Anthropology,  Qualitative Research and Data Analysis for master’s students, PhD students and researchers in Poland, Mexico, Spain and India. She directed the ethnographic documentary film “Shepherds in Resistance: The profession today in Catalonia” (Sept.2023) and  “The aim is to get Moksha”. Tradition and modernity in the practice of Kalarippayattu  in Kerala, India. (July, 2022). She is now producing an ethnographic documentary about peasants in Kerala, India.