Mariana is a PhD student in Sociology at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, where she is a research associate at the Institute for Latin American Studies (LAI) in the framework of the project "Food for Justice: Power, Politics and Food Inequalities in a Bioeconomy". Her doctoral project studies social movements that promote change towards fairer and more socially and environmentally responsible food systems. She was trained as a sociologist at Universidad Católica de Chile, has a diploma in Socio-environmental Studies from Universidad de Chile and an M.Sc. in Environmental Governance from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her academic and professional career has developed around environmental sociology and governance of natural resources in Latin America, focusing on the issues of water, forests and agriculture. She has worked on the promotion of a territorial approach to overcome socio-economic, ethnic and gender inequalities from the perspective of political, feminist and democratic ecology; she is interested in rethinking the ways of living and the relationships between humans and nature to address the global socio-environmental crisis; in understanding the social dynamics of natural resource management, the interface between scientific knowledge and political processes, and in promoting cooperative mechanisms to promote social and environmental justice.