Paula Escribano is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid. She is part of the Reciprocity Studies Group (GER) at the University of Barcelona, where she leads the line of research on Food Systems alongside Seth Holmes. Recently, Paula participated in designing the Safeguarding Plan for the Conservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Royal Cattle Tracks in Spain (2024-2025).

Her main research areas include (1) political economy, livelihood strategies, informal economies, sociocultural effects of crises, public policies, structural violence and forms of resistance; (2) political ecology, ruralities, (im)mobilities, new forms of peasantry, agrarian change, agroecology, pastoralism, extensive livestock farming and environmental crisis; and (3) qualitative methodologies, fieldwork, participatory research and audiovisual ethnography.

Paula has conducted research in Spain, Hungary and India. She uses ethnographic fieldwork and mixed methods to collect and analyse data. Currently, she is leading the project ‘Ruralities in transition: an audiovisual approach to eco-social tensions in rural areas in Catalonia’, funded by the Fundación Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació (FCRI) through the Joan Orò programme. She received a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant (2021-2023) to lead the project Subsistence strategies, neoliberalism and environmental values: short chains of food production and distribution (FJC2020-042879-I) and she participated in the project Valuable food, essential workers, vulnerable people and social responses to crisis: food provisioning systems during the COVID-19 pandemic (FOOD-Pan), PI: Susana Narotzky (UB) (2021-2023), PID2020-114317GB-I00.

Paula was awarded a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology by the Autonomous University of Barcelona for her thesis ‘Back-to-the-land’ in Catalonia: an anthropological perspective (July 2020). Her master’s thesis (2014) explored social reproduction in a Hungarian eco-village in a post-socialist context. Paula worked as an associate lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) from 2015 to 2021. She has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (UB) since 2021 and as an associate lecturer at the same department since 2024. Her teaching has encompassed seminars on ethnographic reading and critical theory, as well as subjects such as sex/gender classification systems, qualitative methodologies and economic anthropology, among others. She has also been invited to deliver training courses on research and qualitative data analysis for master’s and doctoral students and research staff in Poland, Mexico, Spain and India.

Paula has directed the ethnographic documentaries Veus Trashumants (2025); Pastorxs en Resistencia. El oficio hoy en Cataluña (2023); and ‘The aim is to get Moksha’: Tradition and modernity in the practice of Kalarippayattu in Kerala, India (2022).