Mariana Espinosa

Mariana Espinosa has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires. She is Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in the Institute of Anthropology of Córdoba - Museum of Anthropology, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. She investigated the evangelical expansion and socio-cultural transformations among Syrian immigrants and indigenous people of Northwestern Argentina. Currently, she is investigating the relationship between the evangelical field, interculturality, and local-international public space.

The project

Title: Evangelicals and Politics in the Face of the 2030 Agenda. Articulations and Divergences between Cases in Argentina and France.

"This project is part of a broader research program that examines the positioning of religious actors in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda in Argentina across local, national, and international scales. Previous findings (Espinosa and Fantilli, 2025) demonstrate that several ecumenical Protestant-evangelical organizations assumed a prominent role in institutional dialogue with the national government and civil society actors during the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Although such engagement — albeit with variations — continued throughout the administrations of Mauricio Macri and Alberto Fernández, it was substantially reconfigured under the presidency of Javier Milei.

Concurrently, other evangelical organizations that had not previously taken a public stance began articulating positions marked by significant reservations regarding the 2030 Agenda. These positions exceed the national context, revealing affinities with transnational dynamics commonly associated with the “Christian right” in Europe. This broader landscape is characterized by the consolidation of new right-wing political formations that both extend and reconfigure twentieth-century conservative movements.

In this framework, the project seeks to conduct a comparative analysis of selected evangelical organizations in Argentina and France, focusing on their orientations toward the SDGs and on their strategies of organization, public visibility, and legitimation within both national public spheres and transnational fields of power."

Hosting institution: Centre de Recherche et de Documentation des Amériques l’Université (CREDA - Sorbonne Nouvelle-CNRS)

Selective Bibliography

• Espinosa Mariana, Británicos, indígenas y árabes. La expansión evangélica en la Argentina interior, Córdoba, EDUVIM, 2025
• Espinosa Mariana y Fantilli Almendra, Organizaciones evangélicas y ecuménicas en torno a los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible de la Agenda 2030 en la Argentina. Articulaciones contemporáneas en el espacio público local-global, Revista Sociedad y religión, vol 35, n°66, 2025 
• Espinosa Mariana y Rueda Sofía, Centro Ecuménico Cristiano de Córdoba. Un estudio sobre una formación protestante-evangélica en los años previos y durante la última dictadura militar argentina (1973-1983), Revista Protesta y Carisma, 2024
• Espinosa Mariana, Ethnography of uneasiness. Violence and religion among the Guarani of the Andean foothills in the 1970s, Argentina, In: Capredon, Elise, César Ceriani Cernadas y Opas, Minna (Eds), Indigenous churches: Anthropology of Christianity in the Lowlands of South America, Palgrave MacMillan, 2022 
• Espinosa Mariana, Des-indianización y etnicidad evangélica en el piedemonte y el altiplano andinos de Jujuy, Memoria Americana, vol. 28, núm. 2, 2020