BC3. Basque centre for climate change – Klima aldaketa ikergai

Short CV

I was born on a farm, somewhere in what was later called the 'emptied Spain'. I grew up among goats and peach trees until I moved to the big city as a teenager. I studied Environmental Sciences in Málaga, MSc in Applied Ecology in Halmstad (Sweden), and another MSc in Environmental Hydrology in Granada. At that point, I realized that this knowledge was insufficient to answer the fundamental question of why do we continue to cause environmental harm. I decided to pursue a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Seville, in collaboration with Ecological Economics teams from the Institute for Environmental Sciences and Technology (ICTA) in Barcelona. It took me a while to articulate what my PhD was about: combining qualitative and quantitative methods in a framework for assessing water management in two semiarid watersheds in Arizona and Almería.

My first posdoc continued this research line linking water to food and energy analysis within the project MAGIC - Moving towards Adaptive Governance in Complexity. MAGIC was an intense experience in project coordination and interdisciplinary collaboration. I learned from postnormal science scholars about extended peer communities and uncertainty. I contributed to the development of a framework named Quantitative Story-Telling aimed at challenging dominant narratives in sustainability policies and innovations, and applied it to the analysis of alternative water resources use for agriculture in the Canary Islands. Over those years, I joined a training program in group facilitation that was immensely transformative on many levels. I moved to Bilbao to start a family. This life change led me to ask myself what I really dreamed of my research, and I decided to shift towards qualitative and participatory research approaches.

I joined BC3 in January 2021 as a Juan de la Cierva fellow. I initiated a research line on knowledge co-production about wicked water governance problems related to agricultural production and ecosystem protection, with an in-depth case study on the highly contested eutrophication in the Mar Menor lagoon in Murcia (Spain). I analyzed the societal polarization process unfolding over the lagoon’s crisis as a gradual entanglement of epistemic, political and affective differences into two divergent social identities, ‘saviours of the lagoon’ and ‘denialist of the lagoon’, who confront the responsibility of agricultural activities. Within this context, I facilitated a knowledge co-production process aimed at fostering spaces for listening and dialogue between polarized actors. I have shared my results in various formats with a wide range of actors, including policy makers with direct responsibility over the lagoon’s management. In 2023, I was awarded a Ramón y Cajal fellowship, which has enabled me to consolidate this research line, liase to international networks such as the Transformations Community, and explore emerging themes and theories such as nature-based solutions, the rights of nature, process-relational approaches to sustainability, or situated affectivity. Over these years, I have also travelled with new theoretical companions like Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Marisol de la Cadena or Karen Barad. These encounters have gradually reshaped the way I understand the problems I care about and my role as researcher.

For more formal details about this journey, you can download my CV below or visit my blog at violetacabello.net.

Journal Articles

BC3 Working Papers & Policy Briefings