Azucena Castro studies multispecies relationality in Latin American and Caribbean future fictions for sustainability thinking from environmental humanities perspectives

Castro is a postdoctoral researcher at the centre and a visiting researcher at materia, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University (mid-2022-mid-2024) leading the 36-month, international postdoc project “Multispecies futuring. Biocultural diversity in Latin American and Caribbean future fictions” funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Multispecies Futuring analyses future-making practices involving multispecies worlds in Latin American and Caribbean future fictions from the end of the twentieth century, when biodiversity loss entered global environmental discourses, to works inspired in the present COVID 19 zoonotic pandemic.

By combining feminist posthumanism, literary studies, and environmental humanities in a transdisciplinary framework, this project investigates relations of these future fictions with the biodiversity crisis to contribute new critical vocabulary to sustainability scholarship. It decenters the field from its predominant human focus. It reshapes Western imagination by including diverging environmental futures enriching the field.

Castro holds a PhD in Spanish with orientation in Latin American literature and culture from Stockholm University, an MA in Spanish with orientation in literary studies from the University of Lund and a BA in English from the University of Córdoba, Argentina.

Working with ecopoetry and postnatural poetics in her PhD education, she developed analytical and conceptual skills in the environmental humanities, ecocriticism and posthumanism.

Before coming to the SRC, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a postdoc (2020-2021) at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires, where she is a member of the Nature, Culture, Territory Study Group.

Her doctoral dissertation deals with postnatural aesthetics entailing strange ecologies and queer natures in contemporary Latin American ecopoetry that emerges in the context of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, her dissertation sheds light on the diverse currents of Latin American poetry that have engaged the environment and the geographical landscape from literary and cultural perspectives.

Castro's major research topics include cultural studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, art-science, feminist posthumanism, new materialism, environmental justice, Afro-indigenous environmentalisms, history of climate change and Anthropocene in the Global South.

Her interdisciplinary research aims at bridging the gap between humanities and natural science as well as academia and local knowledges. She is a member of to the network Red Iberoamericana de Investigación en Humanidades Ambientales RIHUA, and associated researcher in the Focal Group Cultura, Naturaleza, Territorio, Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires.

Together with Dr. Andrea Casals Hill from Facultad de Letras, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and Dr. Nuno Marques from Environmental Humanities Lab, KTH, Sweden, as associated researcher to the Nordic Institute of Latin American Studies, Castro will be teaching the PhD course “Critiques and Practices of Sustainability: Environmental Humanities Perspectives on Chilean and Swedish Ecocultures of Water, Land, and Air” as part of the ACCESS agreement (co-financed by STINT) in the spring semester 2022. Find out more and enroll here.

Awards and achievements

• Högskoleföreningen Stockholm dissertation award from the Faculty of Humanities, Stockholm University (2020) as “distinguished scientific achievement" for dissertation “Ecologías extrañas: Lecturas postnaturales de poemas extensos latinoamericanos del siglo XXI (Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, Daniel Samoilovich y Luigi Amara)”.