Cristóbal Bonelli is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Clinical Psychologist trained in systemic psychotherapy, and Social Anthropologist specializing in medical and environmental anthropology. His research explores how ecological, technological, and intercultural transformations shape health, coexistence, and the possibilities of sustaining life amid planetary crisis.

He has conducted long-term ethnographic and clinical work in Chile, examining healing, illness, vision, and personhood in Mapuche-Pewenche territories, and studying how shamanic, therapeutic, and environmental processes unfold within relational and intercultural ecologies. In the Atacama Desert, his research follows the layered materialities of nitrate, copper, and lithium, exploring how extractivism and technological transformations reconfigure territorial, scientific, and political futures.

As Principal Investigator of the ERC project Worlds of Lithium, Bonelli leads interdisciplinary collaborations that bridge anthropology, psychology, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. His teaching and supervision focus on sustainability, clinical and ethnographic methodologies, and the politics of planetary coexistence.

Current teaching:

• Worlds in Transition: Rethinking Life in Times of Ecological Crisis (BA elective)
• Multispecies Ecologies and Planetary Matter (Master’s course)
• Thinking with the Planet: Crisis, Care and the Politics of Planetary Futures (Winter School, PhD/MA students and health professionals)
• The Politics of Sustainability: Environments, Cultures, Materials (Master’s course)

Bonelli has held two major European research grants — a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and a European Research Council (ERC) project — both examining how ecological and technological transformations reshape contemporary forms of coexistence.
His Marie Curie project, Invisible Waters, studied groundwater practices in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert on Earth, revealing how mining, dryness, and desert ecologies complicate conventional understandings of decarbonisation and environmental knowledge.
Building on this foundation, his ERC project, Worlds of Lithium (WOL), investigates the societal and ecological implications of lithium extraction and battery technologies across Chile, China, and Norway, showing how energy transitions expose new relations between materials, technologies, and planetary ethics.

Together, these projects form a long-term inquiry into the material conditions of thought, exploring how energy, matter, and ecology open new spaces for philosophical, aesthetic, and anthropological experimentation.

Bonelli’s current research unfolds once again in the Atacama Desert — the driest place on Earth and the region with the highest solar radiation — where he studies stratigraphies of light: the entanglements of the photovoltaic, the photosynthetic, and the photosensitive regimes. In collaboration with Indigenous communities, artists, archaeologists, astronomers, and microbiologists, the project explores how technological, cosmo-technical, and image-making practices of light — from solar panels to microbial photosensitivity — generate shifting fields of luminosity and shadow through which the material and imaginative conditions of life are composed.

At the University of Amsterdam, Bonelli teaches from within the crossings of anthropology, ecology, and the arts, where learning becomes a practice of attention, composition, and care. His courses—Worlds in Transition, Multispecies Ecologies and Planetary Matter, and Thinking with the Planet—invite students to engage with the shifting continuities between the living and the non-living, rethinking sustainability beyond the confines of management or preservation. Through collaborative discussions and creative assignments, his teaching approaches sustainability as an experimental practice, where ethnography becomes a way to think and feel with the material, ecological, and multispecies entanglements of the present. Students are encouraged to debate and experiment with different ways of dramatizing the nonhuman—whether in Indigenous cosmopolitics, the new materialisms, or scientific imaginaries of agency and matter—cultivating natureculture sensibilities that attend to the fragile co-presence of matter, image, and life, and imagine forms of coexistence that exceed both human mastery and technical control.

Current courses

• Worlds in Transition: Rethinking Life in Times of Ecological Crisis (BA elective)

• Multispecies Ecologies and Planetary Matter (Master’s course)

• Thinking with the Planet: Crisis, Care and the Politics of Planetary Futures (Winter School for PhD/MA students and health professionals)

• The Politics of Sustainability: Environments, Cultures, Materials (Master’s course)

Previous courses

• Environments, Alterities and the Anthropological Imagination (Undergraduate)

• Practicing Ethnography (Undergraduate)

• Ethnographies and Academic Writing (Undergraduate)

Bonelli is also Supervisor at the Master on Cultural and Social Anthropology, at the  Research Master's in Social Sciences, at the  Master in International Development Studies and at the Master in Medical Anthropology and Sociology