Kelly Yubini Yubini

I am a PhD student in Territorial Studies of the Global South at Universidad de Concepción and an associate researcher at the Urban Laboratory (LabUrba) of the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Geography. I am a sociologist and hold a Master’s degree in Geographic Analysis from Universidad de Concepción, with additional training in Geographic Information Systems from Universidad de Chile.

My research lies at the intersection of economic geography, innovation studies, political ecology, and computational data analysis. I currently study how the energy transition and the discourse surrounding critical minerals are reconfiguring extractive industries, with a focus on copper and lithium mining.

Through the analysis of public policy documents, corporate reports, and large textual corpora, I examine how narratives on mineral criticality evolve and align across global, national, and corporate scales, contributing to the transformation of socio-ecological relations of production and modes of value capture in natural resource-based economies.

In addition to my research work, I am interested in developing and applying reproducible tools for spatial analysis and data science using R, as well as geographic information processing, text mining, and data visualization applied to social sciences.

On this website, I share research updates, publications, projects, resources on R programming and spatial analysis, as well as reflections on economic geography, innovation, critical mining, and the energy transition.