Teresa Casas is a predoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), affiliated with the Doctoral Program in Models and Areas of Research in Social Sciences. She is a member of the Collective Identity Research Center (CEIC), where she develops research on legislative processes, discourse analysis, and the emotional and symbolic dimensions of criminal lawmaking, with a particular focus on punitive drift in contexts of institutional crisis and ideological polarization.

She holds a Master’s degree in the Sociology of Law from the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL Oñati, EHU–International Sociological Association), graduating with distinction (GPA 9.33/10). Her award-winning Master’s thesis (André-Jean Arnaud Prize), supervised by Ignacia Perugorría Frattini, examined how parliamentary discourse shaped the legislative trajectory and political effects of Spain’s “Only Yes Means Yes” law. She previously obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology (University of A Coruña), graduating top of her class and receiving both the Extraordinary Degree Award and the Academic Excellence Award.

Her research agenda is structured around two interconnected lines. First, she examines the punitive turn in criminal lawmaking, focusing on how penal expansion is produced through legislative processes and how it can be empirically traced through discourse, framing strategies, and affective dynamics in parliamentary debate. Second, she investigates socio-ecological conflicts linked to processes of “infrastructural colonization” in devalued territories such as Galicia, analysing how collective identities shape contestation, legitimacy, and resistance in these contexts. Across both lines, she adopts a socio-legal and cultural-sociological approach to understand law as a site of symbolic and political struggle.

She is the author of a forthcoming article in Justice, Power and Resistance (Bristol University Press), titled “The Illusion of Green Progress: Galicia’s Wind Power Expansion as a State-Corporate Crime”, and serves as a peer reviewer for the journal. She is also preparing an article for the Revista Española de Sociología (RES) on the symbolic and emotional dynamics of parliamentary debate in contexts of political polarization.

Her research aligns with the ENLIGHT IDenti-T Network by analysing how identities are constructed, mobilized, and contested across both legislative arenas and socio-ecological conflicts. In doing so, she contributes to key IDenti-T themes such as gender politics, environmental justice, and political polarization, while addressing broader questions about democratic transformation, the politicization of law, and the socio-symbolic foundations of institutional legitimacy.

ORCID: 0009-0003-4201-3432
Email: tcasas002@ikasle.ehu.eus