Claudia González Marrero

Claudia González Marrero is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and an associate researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation.

She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University. Her doctoral dissertation, Literatura, política y sociedad. Cuatro representaciones de imaginarios en la Revolución cubana (Hypermedia, 2021), explores the relationship between social imaginaries and cultural policy under the normative totalitarianism of the Cuban revolutionary state.

Her research focuses on social contestation and symbolic re-signification in authoritarian and closed political contexts, emphasizing the intersection of academic inquiry, artistic production, and political engagement. As an associate researcher at Gobierno y Análisis Político (GAPAC), she has contributed to regional analyses of autocratic influence in Latin America—particularly the dynamics of embedded academia, sharp power, and the emergence of counter-hegemonic civil society actors. At the Observatorio de Derechos Culturales (ODC), her work has critically examined authoritarian cultural governance, including processes of re-patrimonialization, the instrumentalization of collective memory, and restrictions on artistic freedom.

Since 2020, she has led the Food Monitor Program, an academic observatory that documents and critiques food policy in authoritarian regimes across Latin America, analyzing their impact on governance and the spatiality of everyday life.

Methodologically, Claudia privileges qualitative, grounded approaches that center the voices and practices of cultural agents navigating authoritarianism. Her fieldwork includes interviews with artists, writers, and intellectuals, as well as the ethnographic documentation of vernacular language—such as Cuban expressions related to food and domestic economies. Her recent research explores mechanisms of autocratic adaptation, including currency extraction, transnational governance, informal economies, and everyday forms of resistance in contexts marked by crisis and constraint.