María Zapata Hidalgo

MARÍA ZAPATA HIDALGO holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology (USAL, 2006) and in Social and Cultural Anthropology (UNED, 2013), and a PhD in Feminist and Gender Studies (UPV/EHU, 2019). From 2015 to 2018 she was a fellow of the Basque Government programme for the Training of non-Doctoral Research Staff, linked to the UPV/EHU Philosophy of Values and Social Anthropology department as a predoctoral researcher and to the Research Group AFIT-Antropologia Feminista Ikerketa Taldea (Feminist Anthropology Research Group).

Her defended PhD thesis is a research that takes as its methodology corporal and feminist ethnography, and deals with recuperation processes of people who have gone through depression. It is a study which analyses the capacity of agency in people and collectives in their processes of health-illness-attention, and always with the transversality of the gender variable in all the phases of the research project, interacting with others such as age or socioeconomic level. Moreover, she takes the corporal as the central focus of her analysis, thus including the dimension personified in subjects and collectives in order to assure a more holistic gaze in anthropology works on health and medicine.

In 2016 she won the Grupo de 9 Universidades “Research in Gender Studies Award” for her Master’s dissertation. She has since taken part in the organisation of a number of academic encounters, such as de Summer Course “Salud mental en primera persona” [Mental health in first person] (UPV/EHU, 2019) and various round tables about anthropology and affects (AIBR Congresses 2018 and 2019). She is currently part of the governing board of Ankulegi, as well as performing as an actor and theatre coach in community processes. She cofounded AntzerkiZ and has been involved in projects such as Haize Eroak with the Why Not? Foundation (San Sebastian) and Harrotu Ileak in the Tabakalera Arts Centre (San Sebastian).

The areas of research she is interested in are: anthropology of the body and emotions, feminist anthropology, the anthropology of medicine and health, and feminist methodologies and epistemologies.

Publications:

https://metaaprendizaje.academia.edu/mariazapata