Dr Sofía Ugarte

  • Affiliated Researcher
Dr Sofía Ugarte

Contact

About

Before coming to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge as a PhD student, I completed an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology (University College London) and a BA in Sociology (P. Universidad Católica de Chile).  I also worked in Chile as a research assistant at the P. Universidad Católica and a policy consultant in projects for UNESCO and the Chilean government.

For my doctoral thesis, I conducted 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with Haitian women and their everyday encounters with state agents and Chilean employers.  I looked at how migrant women’s efforts to live and work in a new country reconfigured political and economic institutions underpinned by postcolonial hierarchies and neoliberal power dynamics. 

I focus on the intersections between the anthropology of gender and racism and its convergence with anthropological debates about state-formation and economic practices in postcolonial contexts. I am interested in exploring how experiences of difference bring to the fore novel ways of understanding the processes and relations that constitute states and markets, and how economic and political imaginaries are constructed in and through intimate subjectivities and encounters. I am also interested in reworking social reproduction theories from an intersectional perspective to understand contemporary life-sustaining actions in a world in crisis.

 

Research

Research interests

  • Social reproduction
  • Gender and care
  • Racism
  • Political economy
  • Capitalism
  • Labour
  • Migration
  • Decolonial methods
  • Chile and Latin America

Publications

Articles

  • 2022, forthcoming. “Caring for a responsible self: Migrant motherhood and the politics of reproduction.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
  • 2022, forthcoming. “Skilling race: Affective labor and ‘white’ pedagogies in the Chilean service economy.” American Anthropologist.
  • 2021. “Desired formality: Labor migration, black markets, and the state in Chile.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Online first.
  • 2018. “‘What if the worst happened?’ Life insurance in London as a two-faced technology.” Journal of Consumer Culture 18(1), 43–59.
  • Under review. “When ‘brujería’ stays behind: Kinship moralities and remittances across borders.” Nova Religio.
  • In progress. “Pensions at a time of crises: Subsistence and dispossession in a migrant household.”

Book Manuscript

  • In progress. States of Care: Affective Labor and Racism in Migrant Chile.

Book Chapters

  • Under review. “Racialized positionalities: Ethnographic responsibility and the study of racism and whiteness.” In Fuminati, M., C. Lynteris & M. Demian (eds.) Anthropology and Responsibility. Routledge.
  • 2020. Buscando la regularidad migratoria en los márgenes del estado: Encuentros con la burocracia chilena [Searching for migrant legality at the margins of the state: Encounters with Chilean bureaucracy]. In Galaz, C., N, Gissi & M. Facuse (eds.) Migraciones Transnacionales: Inclusiones diferenciales y posibilidades de reconocimiento. Santiago, Chile: Social Ediciones.

Book Reviews

  • 2021. Angé, Olivia. Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes. Berghahn Books, 2018. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
  • 2019. Shoaff, Jennifer L. Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-state. University of Alabama Press, 2017. Journal of Latin American Studies 51(4), 973–975.
  • 2018. Louis, Bertin M., My Soul is in Haiti: Protestantism in the Haitian Diaspora of the Bahamas. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Religion and Society 9(1), 210–212.

Teaching and supervision

Undergraduate Teaching and Supervisions

  • SAN2 – The Foundations of Social Life: Anthropology and Kinship
  • SAN13 – Anthropology of Gender, Kinship and Care: States of Care
  • Dissertations

Postgraduate Teaching

  • MPhil SAR – Anthropology and Social Policy