Marina holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Binghamton University-SUNY, and she currently works as  Senior Researcher for the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Worlds of Lithium: A multi-sited and transnational study of transitions towards post-fossil fuel societies’.

She has lived and researched for the last 10 years in the Chilean and Argentinean Andes, and her work can be placed at the intersection between political anthropology, critical theories of the State and development studies.

As the leader of the Worlds of Lithium work-package on Chile, she studies how lithium connects and transforms landscapes and societies in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert of the world. More particularly, she looks at how lithium extraction practices are entangled within social and material transformative dynamics in Atacama, where some of the biggest lithium deposits are located. 

Her most recent research has concentrated on how the material and social dynamics mineral extraction conveys in northern Chile, focusing on the ways in which the materiality of copper -along with the political economy that shapes extractivism- has affected and reshaped bodies within and beyond Chuquicamata mine.

She is affiliated to the Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology -San Pedro de Atacama- Universidad Católica del Norte, where she is Assistant Professor since 2016. http://iaa.ucn.cl/web/profesores/marina-weinberg/