About

Ph.D. New York University; MA University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; BA and BJ, University of Missouri-Columbia

Christine M. Martínez is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at Bates College. Her research and teaching center communities marginalized by ongoing colonial processes and neoliberal development in 21st-century environmental, food, and climate change discourses. She is particularly interested in how small-farmers, migrant farmworkers, and rural feminist movements in the Iberian Peninsula and Atlantic Basin propose alternatives to neoliberal environmentalisms and climate change discourses. Trained in literary and cultural studies, she is interested in how these groups narrate themselves and build networks of transnational thought and alliance through creative works, such as films, zines, and other forms of literature or storytelling.

Christine is currently working on a book project, titled Beneath the Asphalt: Cultivating Futures Beyond the Ruins of Spanish Neoliberal Capitalism, which shows how popular critiques of the Spanish construction boom of the 1990s and 2000s reinforced urban, capitalist, and neocolonial ways of relating to land. It highlights the need for centering the voices and experiences of those who work the land in critiques of contemporary Spanish capitalism. Her future and ongoing research explores what Southern European environmental and agroecological actors learn from engaging with peasant and migrant farmworker movements in the Global South, particularly in challenging Eurocentric development paradigms, such as EU agricultural policy. Christine has also published widely on environmental thinking in Spanish comics and tactics for teaching critical environmental awareness and citizenship in literature and “foreign” language classrooms. She is an active member of various scholarly initiatives, including ALCES XXI, working to promote public humanities and community-relevant research.

Selected publications:

“Futuros campesinos: La transición ecosocial, los movimientos rurales ibéricos y la reivindicación de la identidad campesina.” In Espacios y límites de la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea, edited by Mónica López Lerma. Granada, Editorial Comares, 2024.

“Drawing Ecological Thought: Anthropomorphism and Satire as Critique of Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century Spanish Comic.” in Beyond Human: Decentering theAnthropocene in Spanish Ecocriticism, edited by Shanna Lino and Maryanne Leone, Toronto Iberic, 2023.

“Environmental Politics, Ecological Thought, and Spanish Comics.” co-authored with Jorge Catalá. In Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Ed. Luis I. Prádanos. Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2023.

“Urban Ecology and Comics Journalism in Jorge Carrión and Sagar Forniés’ Barcelona: Los vagabundos de la chatarra (2015).” Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Eds. Matthew Marr and Samuel Amago. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2019.

“The Affirmative Politics of Degrowth: Miguel Brieva’s graphic narrative Memorias de la Tierra.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 18:2, 2017.