Cristóbal Bonelli is a Chilean interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Indigeneity, and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam. His research explores how planetary transformations reshape the ways worlds are sensed, imagined, and inhabited — opening new spaces for affect, coexistence, and thought across entangled human and more-than-human lives.

Formed at the crossroads of Clinical Psychology, Social Anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies — in Chile, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands — Bonelli’s trajectory weaves together diverse epistemic and aesthetic traditions. His work investigates how knowledge emerges from the entanglement of heterogeneous worlds and practices, and how these encounters reconfigure what it means to learn, to imagine, and to live within a planet in transformation.

Since 2008, he has developed a sustained body of ethnographic research in Chile that unfolds across two regions and phases. His early work (2008–2015) focused on Pehuenche communities in southern Chile, examining how public health policies intersect with Indigenous understandings of body, illness, and healing — and how these encounters reveal the challenges and creativity of intercultural communication. Over the past decade, his attention has turned to the Atacama Desert, where he studies how ancestral practices of adaptation converge with extractive and geopolitical energies shaping the global energy transition.

Bonelli’s research is grounded in ongoing interdisciplinary experimentations that bring anthropology into conversation with philosophy, the arts, and the natural sciences. These collaborations include projects with philosopher Annemarie Mol on empirical and feminist modes of thought; anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena on Chilean streets and the politics of history; photographer Luis Poirot on image, absence, and memory; microbiologist Cristina Dorador on microbial ecologies and political concepts; chemist Martina Gamba on the chemical imagination of deep time; psychiatrist Marcelo Pakman on the poetics and singularity of clinical work; anthropologist Marina Weinberg on Bipolar Energy Transitions; and archaeologist Valentina Figueroa on Archaeological Stratigraphic Visualizations of the Anthropocene. Together, these interdisciplinary alliances explore how artistic, scientific, and ethnographic practices can reimagine energy, materiality, and care as relational and situated phenomena.

He currently leads the European Research Council project Worlds of Lithium, which follows the planetary circulations of lithium — from its extraction in the Atacama Desert to its transformation in batteries and recycling in Asia and Europe. Building on this work, his recent research investigates the aesthetics of carbon neutrality, understood not only as a commitment to reducing emissions but also as an invitation to imagine the reduction of omissions — the social, ecological, and epistemic blind spots that notions of progress tend to leave behind.

At the University of Amsterdam, he teaches courses that cultivate the capacity to be affected by ecological and social transformations, combining ethnographic practice with aesthetic and philosophical reflection to foster more imaginative and responsible ways of thinking planetary futures.

• 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)

Currently, Bonelli leads the ERC project titled Worlds of Lithium (WOL), which investigates the societal impacts of lithium extraction and lithium-ion batteries in global energy transition efforts. Through empirical studies in Chile, China, and Norway, my research sheds light on our interdependence and co-constitution with these materials and technologies, exploring their transformative implications within the complexities of modern life in times of climate change.

Worlds of Lithium builds upon his previous research, Invisible Waters, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU programme. This project focused on groundwater practices in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the driest desert in the world, highlighting the urgency of ecologically studying and rethinking what decarbonisation strategies entail.

Postgraduate level

• The Politics of Sustainability: Environments, Cultures, Materials /  Multispecies ecologies and Planetary Matter

Undergraduate level

• Environments, Alterities and the Anthropological Imagination / Practicing Etnography / Ethnographies and academic writing

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