Senior scientist: assistant professor Mónica Cuéllar Gempeler

Mónica Cuéllar Gempeler is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Her research explores narrative, affect, rural life and people’s relationships with their material and environmental surroundings. She has worked particularly with campesino communities in Boyacá, examining how people experience loss and absence, and how they sustain ways of living in places often portrayed as declining or abandoned.

Within PREFER, Mónica contributes to the Colombian research, with a particular focus on San Miguel de Sema. Her work brings attention to the experience of staying: the practical, emotional and narrative work through which people maintain a life and a relationship to place despite profound social and environmental change. Her research suggests that staying is not simply the absence of leaving, but an active way of sustaining a present and imagining a future.

Her ethnographic and narrative approach is particularly relevant to PREFER’s interest in local understandings of terminal situations: what is experienced as being at stake, what is worth holding on to, and how people give meaning to futures that may appear uncertain or foreclosed.