Miren Guilló Arakistain
Miren Guilló Arakistain is an anthropologist and lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of Values and Social Anthropology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She holds a diploma in Social Education (UPV/EHU, 2004), a bachelor’s degree in Pedagogy (UPV/EHU, 2006) and in Social and Cultural Anthropology (UPV/EHU, 2012), and a PhD in Feminist and Gender Studies (UPV/EHU, 2020). She is interested in lines of research involving anthropology of medicine and health, social theory of affect and the body, gender systems, feminist and corporal epistemologies, critical studies of science and biomedicine, collective knowledge processes, agency, and social change.
In her PhD thesis she has analysed the alternative politics and cultures of menstruation and the corporal ideologies, gender configurations, and processes of change and agency intersecting said politics and cultures. To this purpose she has developed a corporal ethnography that merges the political, physical, and emotional dimensions of those processes in her analysis. During the PhD’s development she completed especially significant residencies at UC Berkeley (2012), UC San Diego (2013), and IRSA (Institute for Developmental and Strategic Analysis Research Centre/ Inštitut za razvojne in strateške analize) in Ljubljana (2014).
She is a member of AFIT (Feminist Anthropology Research Group, UPV/EHU) and takes part in a range of research projects such as: “SOLIDARY. Nuevas solidaridades, reciprocidades y alianzas: la emergencia de espacios colaborativos de participación política y redefinición de la ciudadanía” [New solidarities, reciprocities, and alliances: the rise of collaborative spaces and the redefinition of citizenship] (MINECO CSO2017-82903-R), and “Komunitateak ehunduz herri ekimenetatik” [Weaving communities from popular initiatives] (Gipuzkoa Provincial Government-UPV/EHU). She is also a member of the Laboratorio Saperi Situati (Universitá di Verona) research group and of research networks SMCR (Society for Menstrual Cycle Research) and RedCAPS (Women healthcare professionals network). She is president of the Basque Anthropology Association ANKULEGI (2015-2020).
She is also interested in the analysis of spaces and politics surrounding festivals, based on a line of research that combines, on one hand, feminist anthropology and a social theory of the body and, on the other, the anthropology of festivals. Additionally, she worked for a number of years in the pedagogical field as a member of various associations and projects merging educational innovation, social topics, gender, and corporality. She applied a feminist anthropological lens to these projects.