Sofía Ugarte

Sofía Ugarte is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), Department of Anthropology. Her work focuses on care, racism, migration, and the life course in Chile and Latin America. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Teaching Associate before joining LSE in 2023 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow.

Her research explores intersections of gender, kinship, and state formation in postcolonial contexts. Notably, her doctoral study examined Haitian migrant women in Santiago, Chile, revealing how state and economic systems perpetuate racial and gendered inequalities. She is currently completing a book, ‘States of Care: Affective Labor and Racism in Migrant Chile,’ and launching a new project on care, intimacy, and politico-economic crises in urban Chile.

• Expertise: Chile/Latin America, care/gender, racism, migration, capitalism, decolonial methods
• Language Proficiency: English, French, Haitian Creole, Spanish
• Awards: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship

Her recent work analyzes retirement insecurity's impact on household economies in Chile, using ethnographic methods and audio-visual storytelling to explore aging, care, and capital in the cost-of-living crisis.