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Biography
Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in the Department of Law, Societies, and Justice at the University of Washington. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Environmental Politics and the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Interdisciplinary Group.
Professor Rubiano-Galvis received his PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management from the University of California, Berkeley. His work studies the political ecologies of extraction and toxicity and the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and law in Latin America. He is interested in how science, technology, and law shape and are shaped by people’s relations with their environments and resources, especially in polluted and extractive landscapes. He draws on concepts from political ecology, science and technology studies, and global environmental politics and uses qualitative methods and interpretive analysis.
Rubiano-Galvis’ research projects have explored the politics of environmental law, conflicts over mining, energy, and oil, the uses of citizen science in environmental justice activism, and climate displacement, among other topics. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation on the history and politics of mercury amalgamation in gold mining in Colombia and the broader circulation of said technique in the Americas over the last three centuries before experts, companies, and governments redefined it as an environmentally harmful practice of stubborn miners in the Global South. His current research also includes a project on algorithmic environmental justice and the "datafication" of mining and environmental policy in Latin America.