Mariana Arias is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Her research interests include the anthropologies of air and atmospheres, sensing practices, environmental histories of Latin America, and urban techno-utopias. Her research dissertation tracks Mexico City's polluted air across technological and social regimes in order to understand how knowledge about air pollution in Mexico City is constituted, circulated, and disputed; the practices and experiences it has produced, as well as the way the object intersects with seemingly disparate concerns within the urban politics of the city.

Mariana’s research draws on twelve months of fieldwork with atmospheric scientists, governmental officials, citizen-led environmental organizations, architects, and environmental startups. These explorations have led her to analyze notions of toxicity and pollution, urban infrastructure and design, expert versus participatory science, environmental governance, and data practices, and to draw from literature on urban political ecology, environmental history in Latin America, Science and Technology Studies - particularly feminist and postcolonial perspectives - and Urban Anthropologies of Mexico.

At GIDEST, Mariana will work with her archival and ethnographic material alongside narrative fiction and other forms of art, including nineteenth-century painting and contemporary amateur photography, to map the ways inhabitants in Mexico City have understood, represented, and engaged with the atmospheric and aerial space throughout time, the environmental imaginaries and speculative practices being conformed around the urban air, and the ways that the on-going pandemic has propelled and modified how architects, designers, and the city’s inhabitants think about air and breath in relation to space.