Emilia Sanabria is a Franco-Colombian anthropologist, trained in the UK who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil for over two decades. Her research draws on medical anthropology, the anthropology of science, and feminist and decolonial theory to critically examine the encounters between Western science and Indigenous and traditional knowledges. She has conducted a range of ethnographic projects on sexual and reproductive health, nutrition and food justice and the demarcations between drugs and medicines.

Between 2018 and 2024, she led the ERC-funded project Healing Encounters: reinventing an Indigenous medicine in the clinic and beyond. The project took encounters as both method and analytic to analyse the prolific contemporary reinvention of ayahuasca healing practices. It asked what healing entails when freed from the narrow confines of (Western) individual-centric frames, situating it instead within struggles for territory, collective thriving and healing justice. Attentive to the layered histories of colonialism, Healing Encounters traced how ayahuasca circulates between clinics, laboratories, neotraditional urban ceremonies and Indigenous territories. It examined the way settler colonial tactics continue to extract plants and knowledges from their multispecies webs of relations.

Emilia’s forthcoming book is provisionally titled Ayahuasca is not a psychedelic: Caring for encounters in the wake of ethno-humanism.

Her current project, PhytoEncounter: Living Labs for more-than-human research, develops experimental protocols for research with – rather than about – plants in collaboration with Indigenous scientists and traditional practitioners. This work expands her longstanding commitment to speculative, participatory research methodologies oriented toward radical care and the cultivation of otherwise futures. In addition, Emilia co-leads the CERMES3 hub Health in the Age of the Global Environmental Crisis and serves on the CNRS Humanities and Social Science Ethics Board as well as its anthropology committee.