Raúl Acosta García

Raúl Acosta García is a social anthropologist and Privatdozent at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich), and a researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt on the ERC-funded NoJoke project. His work interrogates urban activism, environmental governance, technomoral politics, and multispecies urban infrastructures across Mexico, Brazil, Spain and beyond.

Education

• DPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (2007)
• MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford (2003)
• Licenciatura in Communication Science, ITESO Guadalajara (1998)

Research Interests

Acosta’s scholarship centers on the politics of urban life—how activists, NGOs, technocrats and city dwellers negotiate ethical futures in contemporary cities. He analyzes cycling activism in Mexico City, technomoral governance of mobility, river restoration as urban experimentation, and the multispecies infrastructures that sustain or undermine urban ecologies. His regional expertise encompasses Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Venezuela and Peru.

Publication Trajectory

Across 51 peer-reviewed works, he has advanced theorizations of technomoral governance, performative politics and urban bioinfrastructures. Recent articles explore microscopic material flows in coastal cities, the politics of data in cycling advocacy, and the ethical tensions embedded in river-restoration projects. His monograph Civil Becomings (2020) theorizes transnational advocacy networks in the Brazilian Amazon and Mediterranean Europe.

Awards & Funding

• Philip Bagby Studentship, University of Oxford (2003)
• Principal Investigator, DFG project “Aspirational Activism in Urban Latin America” (2016-2019)
• Project Manager, DFG Research Group “Urban Ethics” sub-project on Mexico City (2019-2021)
• Researcher, ERC project NoJoke, Goethe University Frankfurt (2022-present)

Research Groups & Labs

At LMU Munich he coordinates work within the DFG-funded Urban Ethics Research Group; at Goethe University he participates in the NoJoke ERC team investigating political humour and satire. He regularly collaborates with interdisciplinary collectives such as the Urban Bioinfrastructures network and the Roadsides editorial collective.