Dr Denisse Román-Burgos is a social anthropologist working at the intersections of political anthropology, historical anthropology and political economy. Her research focuses on the cultural dimension of local politics through forms of reciprocity and conflict, aiming to understand the relationship between factionalism and uneven access to natural resources in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Her work advances empirically grounded and historically informed analyses of how economic and political transformation, violence, and environmental change are experienced and negotiated in complex social contexts, contributing to debates in the long-term impact of neoliberal policies, the reproduction of everyday life under criminal violence, and the transformation of nature due to the expansion of global commodity production.
Dr Román-Burgos has developed an international research trajectory across Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Spain, through participation in and leadership of collaborative projects. In 2021, she joined the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society, and Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen as a Newton International Fellow to work on her project “Grey zones in agribuisness’ and its harmful consequences for the environment, labor markets and the reproduction of violence” funded by the British Academy (Award number: NIF23\100188). Dr Román-Burgos is a co-convener of the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnography Seminar Series (LACES) hosted by the University of London in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London and the University of Aberdeen. In March 2026 she joined the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona.
Her latest publications include:
- Román-Burgos, Denisse (forthcoming) “Unskilled labor in avocado production”, FOCAAL.
- Román-Burgos, Denisse (2026) “The politics behind avocado production”, Critique of Anthropology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X261436187
- Román-Burgos, Denisse (2026) “On conducting ethnography in twenty-first century Mexico”, Dialectical Anthropology. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-025-09808-5
- Román-Burgos, Denisse (2025) “Destrucción de la naturaleza y producción de mercancías”, Convergencias entre la antropología y la ecología política del Estado, Revista de Estudios Sociológicos, 43(2), 1-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24201/es.2025v43.e2855
Email: denisse.roman@abdn.ac.uk