Cristóbal Bonelli is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and an interdisciplinary scholar trained in clinical psychology and social anthropology. His work spans medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, and science and technology studies, examining how ecological, technological, and intercultural transformations reshape planetary health, forms of coexistence, and the possibilities of sustaining life amid contemporary polycrises. 

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 interdisciplinary experimentation.

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