Ariana is an MA student in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at Concordia University. Her current research is concerned with the representation of nature in the practice of naturalist illustration. In the midst of an unparalleled global environmental crisis, her research focuses on how the figure of the 18th-century naturalist through the recuperation of a more sensuous relationship with nature can help us to reconfigure social practices and environmental ethics. Her project seeks to understand how a practice with a colonial legacy and a socio-cultural specific aesthetic is recontextualized in a community of practitioners in Mexico City, in the present. By becoming a student of naturalist drawing, she likewise explores apprenticeship as an ethnographical method and the fertility of blurring disciplinary boundaries between science and art for the practice of anthropology.

Her interest in communities of practitioners, beyond the academic learning environment, is informed by her experience as a social activist in Argentina where she participated in a feminist network to grant safe information and emotional support to women who decided to get an abortion. This experience drove her to study a Diploma in Sexuality: Bodies, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). She holds a BA in International Studies from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Argentina. Her attentiveness to modes of expertise derives from five years of working as a ‘digital expert’ at a high-tech company.

In the quest of using the senses as a mode of inquiry, one of her recent projects investigated the sensorial dimensions of ice skating. In dialogue with multimodal anthropology, her work experimented with a mix of methods (skating, writing, drawing, photography, and archive) to explore what it means and what it feels like to ‘go skating’, from the standpoint of an immigrant in the Canadian winter context and the sensibility of a former skater. She argues that a sense of belonging emerges from movement, in relation to memory and the body sensing in a new setting.