Beatriz Bustos

Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Chile

Winter 2026

• PECO 5502: Political Ecology of Commodities

• PECO 5504: The Work of Nature

Beatriz Bustos is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Chile. Her research focuses on resource geography and the sociopolitical transformations that natural resource exploitation produces in rural communities. Her work ranges from examining the geography of commodities such as salmon, copper, wine, agro-industries, coal, lithium and green hydrogen, to rural livelihoods under neoliberal extractive economies. More recently, she is researching ideas of rural citizenship, renewable energies, and rural futures. She is the professor responsible for rural and economic geography in her department and has been involved in the organization of Latin-American conferences on Political ecology between 2014-2022. She is responsible for the first book on Political ecology in Chile (Bustos, Barton and Prieto, 2015) and the Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment (2023) the most recent collection of Latin American political ecologists works on the state of nature-society in the region. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin (2018) and a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Durham, UK (2023).