Senior Scientist: Assistant professor Luisa Fernanda Sánchez Silva

Luisa Fernanda Sánchez Silva is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Her research examines how social, political and environmental transformations are experienced and interpreted by people whose lives and places are being reshaped. She has worked extensively on cultural policies, mobility, multiculturalism and the historical and political dynamics of rural and Indigenous populations in Colombia.

Within PREFER, Luisa Fernanda contributes to the Colombian research, with a particular focus on Tenjo, Cundinamarca. Her current work explores how inhabitants experience and reinterpret the profound transformations brought by urbanisation, real-estate pressure and the metropolitan expansion of Bogotá. Questions of arraigo, loss, belonging and changing relationships to place are central to this work, as are the ways in which a place can become unfamiliar to those who have long inhabited it.

Her ethnographic approach brings particular attention to lived experience and to the different ways in which people give meaning to processes of territorial transformation. This perspective contributes to PREFER’s exploration of how apparently large-scale processes of environmental and social change become concrete, experienced and evaluated in everyday life.