Staff profile

I am a cultural geographer interested in cultural and political ecology, materiality, decoloniality, and sustainability. Through my research I explore the materiality of different cultural manifestations, like music or food, in relation to colonial histories, and what this means for our lives in the Anthropocene.

I have a BSc in Environmental Science (UNAM), MSc in Biology (UNAM), and a PhD in Human Geography (Dunelm). My doctoral research looked into son Jarocho in the Sotavento region of eastern Mexico, considering the links between this traditional music and the landscapes of the region, in a context of environmental change.

Before re-joining Durham as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UNAM's Institute for Ecosystems and Sustainability Research (IIES-UNAM) working on the traditional foodscapes of Lake Xochimilco in southern Mexico City. During this time I was a part of Cocina CoLaboratorio, an interdisciplinary collective working within and beyond academia, exploring questions of sustainability through the kitchen, focusing on food and cooking.

I am now back in the Department of Geography as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, conducting research on food, culture, and decoloniality.

• I am interested in questions of sustainability and culture, particularly on cultural expressions and their material forms in the context of the Anthropocene.

Journal Article

• Astorga de Ita, D. (2024). Of ships and soundboxes: Contrapuntal explorations of hydrocoloniality and the materiality of music. Geoforum, 157, Article 104156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104156
• Astorga de Ita, D. (2024). Grassland Geopoetics: Son Jarocho and the Black Sense of Place of Plantations and Pastures. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 56(3), 872-895. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12999
• Astorga de Ita, D. (2023). Kitchen phenomenologies: Antiromantic poetics of space and food in the Anthropocene. Area, 55(4), 514-522. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12889
• Astorga de Ita, D. (2022). Musical Hydropoetics: Fluvial Inhabitings, Son Jarocho, and Anthroposcenes. Geohumanities, 8(2), 435-456. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2022.2045208