Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His research was awarded the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and is known for its critical insights and experimental style.
Martínez has 15 years of ethnographic experience studying the materiality of political relations in Estonia, Georgia and Portugal. He currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain.
Martínez is the author of four monographs and has edited numerous volumes and theme issues, publishing in leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Material Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Social Anthropology, JRAI, Cultural Geography, and Environment & Planning. His new book, The Future of Hiding (Cornell University Press, 2025), investigates the intersections of secrecy with energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia.
He pushes anthropology beyond traditional boundaries. He advocates for methodological innovation through expanded ethnographies and experimental collaborations, creating immersive experiences that challenge viewers’ perceptions of materiality and memory.
Martínez is particularly interested in the material modes of knowing and leads the Materialities of Crisis Lab. As his publications have shown:
- Contemporary crises have become a continuous negotiation with unstable systems to cope with a multiplicity of quick uncertainties. Therefore there is a need to study how crises manifest through material objects and spaces, emphasizing the instability and negotiation embedded in everyday life.
- We do not repair things because they break, but because we look after them. This insight reframes repair not as a response to breakage but as an act of resistance against consumerist cycles that is part of a wider ecology of care.
- The past does not merely inform the present but interacts dynamically with it, influencing contemporary social practices (including secrecy, neglect, and invisibility). The investigation of what does not disappear properly makes visible broken relationships and where the mark between the old and the new lays.
The exhibitions Martínez has curated showcase an innovative approach and ability to convey complex ideas to diverse audiences. His efforts to open ethnographic ways of doing animated creative ways of disseminating knowledge.
In addition to securing funding and managing research projects at institutions such as Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, he has coordinated MA programmes at the University of Leicester and the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Martínez has been appointed as reviewer of international research projects at Research Council of Lithuania, Baker Research Fund; Ohio University Research Council; Madrid Complutense University; and the ASAEE Museum Anthropology Award.
Also, he has lectured at such prestigious institutions, as Cornell University, Humboldt University, King's College London, Oxford University, the Spanish National Research Council, Creative Campus of the Andres Bello University, the Latvian Academy of Culture, the University of Tartu, the University of Lisbon, and UCL.
