She is an ethnologist/anthropologist of culture and politics, conducting field research in Andean America devoted to ethnopolitics, native populations and gender identity.

Śniadecka-Kotarska explores conflicts among native populations, and the mechanisms of ethno-development from top-down and bottom-up perspectives (emic/etic) on the micro and macro scales.

Between 2010 and 2014 she was also the Polish coordinator of the prestigious MISEAL project (Medidadas para la Inclusión Social y Equidad en Instituciones de Educación Superior en América Latina) of the EU programme ALFA III, which joins together scientific units from 12 Lain American and 4 European countries (Germany, Spain, Great Britain and Poland).

Corollaries to the field research projects were: participation in over 100 international congresses and conferences (including the recurring: the International Congress of Americanists [ICA], the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences [IUAES], Consejo Europeo de Investigaciones sobre América Latina [CEISAL; European Council on Studies of Latin America], the Latin America Studies Association [LASA]), authorship of 8 monographs and 90 articles published in specialist scientific journals in Polish, Spanish and English.

She was the first in Poland in 1995 (first at the University of Warsaw, then at the University of Łódź) to hold lectures, innovative at the time, on: anthropology of Latin American women, narco-violence, socio-cultural and political conflicts, contexts for breaking human rights resulting from different concepts and means of conducting ethno-politics, ethno-development, politics against the narco-trade and cultural sex identity in multi-ethnic countries.

In 2015 the team was incorporated into the Latin American Council of Social Studies network as the 481st research and didactics unit in the world, and the very first in Poland.