Cristóbal Bonelli is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he leads teaching and research on sustainability, ecological transformation, and the politics of planetary coexistence. His work explores how diverse practices of world-making—Indigenous, scientific, and artistic—reshape what a livable Earth might become in times of planetary crisis. Drawing on intersections between anthropology, philosophy, and the arts, his research approaches sustainability as a field of experimentation and imagination, exploring how practices of attention, composition, and care can sustain life and social transformation across entangled and incommensurable worlds.

These concerns emerge from more than a decade of ethnographic work in Chile, where Bonelli has explored how ecological, technological, and affective transformations unsettle the boundaries between knowledge, materiality, and coexistence. His long-term research in Mapuche-Pewenche territories in the south examined how vision, healing, and personhood are shaped through relations that exceed the limits of multicultural recognition, revealing how illness and shamanic practices emerge within distinct yet entangled planes of visibility. Across these inquiries, Bonelli approaches culture not as a stable domain of representation but as a critical and shifting ontological terrain—one where relations, materials, and affects intertwine in ways that render coexistence perceptible and thinkable. In the Atacameño Desert, his research follows the layered materialities of nitrate, copper, and lithium, tracing how extractive histories have turned this landscape into a standing-reserve in the making—while ancestral and microbial worlds continue to unsettle that reduction, reminding us that the desert still exceeds the logic of utility, where other measures of worth—ethical, ecological, and fragile—come to the fore.

In parallel to these ethnographic inquiries, Bonelli has pursued a line of writing born from an existential need to engage with the political and affective intensities of Chile’s recent history. His work moves between the streets of the 2019 social uprising and the photographic archives that span half a century of Chile’s contemporary life, exploring how gestures, voices, and images become fragile sites of exposure—where memory and matter intertwine as unfinished forms of accompaniment and renewal.

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