Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín

• Presentation
• CV
• Research outputs
• Press/Media
• Activities
• Most downloaded

Xaquin S. Perez-Sindin is a scholar of places in transition. Xaquín investigates the social problems and challenges of places affected by rapid processes of transformation in a context of globalization and climate change adaptation. Using a mix of qualitative methods (ethnography, interviews, observation), secondary data and GIS, his main areas of research are spatial inequality, environmental justice, just transition, environmental sociology, and studies of marginalized communities.

I am currently working on two different projects. One is an ethnography of places living near contaminating extractive industries in Colombia. This project documents the life and aspirations of people living a few meters from the largest mining project in Latin America. My research highlights that environmental values and attitudes are mediated by power structures and strong political, cultural, and religious identities. Such structures and identities can perpetuate environmental inequalities and the naturalization of unhealthy living conditions. My project highlights the importance of sociological aspects in the design of development policies. The other project is an investigation on the impacts of climate change mitigation policies – specifically the transition to a low-carbon economy and renewable energies development. The project consists of a survey to understand the perception and acceptance of climate change policies in historically coal dependent regions in Spain, as well as a quantitative analysis of the consequences of mine closure in terms of depopulation and migratory movements in those regions.

Xaquín is currently a fixed term assistant professor at the department of political economy, University of Warsaw, Poland where he currently develops his research activity. He holds a guest research position at the research group on environment and society, department of Geoscience and Natural Research Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark where he was a postdoctoral researcher between 2018 and 2021. He has also held visiting positions at the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology at the Center for Environmental Research, Leipzig, Germany and the University of Magdalena, Santa Marta, Colombia.

He has taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including environmental planning, spatial sociology, urban sociology, and qualitative methods. Besides his work in Colombia and Spain, Xaquín has also conducted research in the former mining areas of Saxony, Germany. He also collaborates with experts in remote sensing techniques, thanks to which he has developed new methods to measure poverty and inequality at very small geographies and thus alleviating the problem of lack of data in rural areas. His work has been supported by EU Marie Curie Sklodowska Postdoctoral program, EU Erasmus plus program, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Before joining academia, he worked as survey research associate in firms based in UK, US, and Spain.