Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis
Assistant Professor, Environmental Justice
University of Washington
In the News:
Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice in the Law, Societies & Justice Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is affiliated with the Center for Environmental Politics and the Science, Technology, and Society Studies Interdisciplinary Group. He is also a Research Affiliate of the Human Contexts and Ethics of Data Program at UC Berkeley's College of Computing, Data Science, and Society.
Dr. Rubiano-Galvis is a researcher and educator at the intersection of critical environmental social sciences and science and technology studies. His work studies the political ecologies of extraction and toxicity and the politics of environmental knowledge, technology, and legal expertise in Colombia and Latin America. Broadly, he is interested in how science, technology, and the law shape and are shaped by people’s relations with their environments and resources, especially in polluted and extractive landscapes. He draws on concepts from political ecology, science and technology studies, and global environmental politics and use interpretive social science methods and qualitative analysis.
His current research includes projects on the global governance of mercury and the "datification" of environmental education, science, and policy. His doctoral research studied the history and politics of mercury amalgamation in gold mining in Colombia and the broader circulation of said technique in the Americas over the last three centuries. His work has appeared in Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Ambix, and Triología: Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, as well as in several edited volumes, and has been funded by Fulbright, UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies, and the US Department of Education.
He teaches about global environmental politics, environmental justice, environment and society, and the socio-political dimensions of science, technology, and data. He has taught introductory courses on social sciences to STEM majors and law students and professional certificates in environmental law and policy.
As part of his public scholarship, he has consulted for various research centers and environmental nonprofit institutions in Colombia and collaborated with various Indigenous and human rights organizations in Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. He serves on the board of the Colombia-based Center for Marine Justice, and he previously worked as Research Director of Environmental Justice at Dejusticia.
In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management with an emphasis on Society and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds degrees in Geography and Law from the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. Before joining UW in 2024, he was a Gerardo Marin Postdoctoral Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco's International Studies Department.