Carol Iglesias Otero is an PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines the imbrication of knowledge practices and labor in sustaining oil industry operations in Mexico's Gulf Coast, under dynamic and hazardous climate conditions, where environmental and labor accidents appear on the rise. Her ethnographic research examines how meteorologists, logistics experts, and risk professionals are tasked with reproducing uninterrupted industrial rhythms in the midst of profound socioeconomic and environmental transformations. How are value, risk, and responsibility constructed by different actors who deal with the paradoxes of reproducing the operations of the oil industry at a time of aging infrastructure, economic austerity programs, and intensified flood, hurricane, and storm risks?

Carol completed her B.A. in Literature at Reed College and earned an M.A. in Visual Cultures (Research Architecture) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Carol's earlier work was concerned with the representation of embodied life in poetics and mathematics; and technology, temporality, and experiences of risk in experimental projects of climate engineering.