Ibañez Martín, R. (Rebeca)

Dr. Rebeca Ibáñez Martín is an anthropologist specializing in critical food studies, environmental anthropology, and social studies of science (STS). She studied History and Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid and completed master’s degrees in Feminist Critical Theory (Complutense University) and Social Studies of Science (University of Oviedo). She received her PhD in Philosophy of Science with “cum laude” distinction from the University of Salamanca, Spain (2014), where her dissertation was awarded the university’s annual prize in Humanities and Arts.

For her postdoctoral research, she worked in the Anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam with Prof. Annemarie Mol under the ERC-funded project “The Eating Body in Western Theory and Practice.” In 2017, she was awarded a NWO-MVI Responsible Innovation grant for the project “Normativities of waste water treatment: Putting micro-algae to work in Ecovillage Boekel”, led by Annemarie Mol. In this project, Ibáñez Martín studied the design and implementation of an experimental nutrient recovery system from wastewater developed at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW).

In January 2019, Rebeca began a tenure-track position at the Ethnology department of the Meertens Institute (HuC-KNAW), where she leads a thematic line on Anthropology of Food, Body and Wellbeing. She achieved tenure as senior scientist in 2022 and was promoted to Associate Professor (UHD2) in 2023 after receiving the Aspasia premie.

Ibáñez Martín serves as a supervisor and lecturer in the Master in Medical Anthropology program at the University of Amsterdam. She is developing several food-agriculture related projects with colleagues from Humanities and Social Sciences, including “A Planetary Food Commons for Healthy and Sustainable Diets” (awarded by the ‘Healthy Futures’ Strategic Plan at the UvA, 2023) and “Raw Earth Agriculture: Supply Chain Criticism and the Political Cartographies of Food” with Dr. Jeff Diamanti (awarded by The Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area, UvA). In 2024, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for “VITALGREENHOUSE: Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: Sustainability, Relationality, and the Future of Food,” which analyzes sustainability transitions in European horticultural greenhouses, focusing on mobility, particularly the circulation of non-humans as collaborators or pests and technological interventions and innovations.

She has held fellowships at the Amsterdam Centre for Urban Studies (CUS, 2020-2021) with the project “Greenhouse Futures: an ethnography of a complex socio-ecological system” and at the Amsterdam Center of European Studies (ACES, 2021-2022) with “Human and Non-Human Mobilities in Dutch and Spanish horticultural greenhouses”. Earlier in her career, she was a visiting fellow at the University of Aarhus (2010) and the University of California Davis (2008-2009).