Sylvanna M. Falcón PhD

Award-Winning Scholar and Educator on Feminism & Human Rights

Welcome! I am an Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I am the founder/director of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at UC Santa Cruz, which is housed in the Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas. I earned my PhD from the Department of Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

I won the 2020 Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching in the Division of Social Sciences and my book, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, won the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize awarded by the National Women’s Studies Association. My new book, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship, is forthcoming in 2024 by University of Illinois Press.


Book Accolades

Praise for Power Interrupted

Power Interrupted is the WINNER of the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa book prize from the National Women’s Studies Association

Teaching Guide for Power Interrupted is now available.

Power Interrupted contributes to the literature on the ways that transnational feminism is both shaping and opening new spaces of possibilities within the UN and transforming the activists and their strategies.”
~ Manisha Desai, Professor of Sociology, University of Connecticut

“Theoretically rich and empirically rigorous, Power Interrupted will shift the way scholars and activists think about the United Nations as a site for feminist anti-racist activism. This work represents the best of the new scholarship pushing us to think more productively about the connections and tensions between intersectionality and the transnational. Falcón shows that anti-racist feminism is challenging the UN to expand the way it addresses racism and women’s rights. A must read.”
~ Mary Margaret Fonow, Professor of women and gender studies, Arizona State University

 


Praise for Precarity and Belonging

This judiciously selected compilation shines by threading the critical link of insecurity through spaces of belonging, labor, and migration across time and contexts. Through the lens of precarity, the insightful, accessible, brilliant essays in this collection expose the complexity and fragility of life at the heart of our troubled times. It breaks new ground and will be read widely.”
~ Cecilia Menjívar, Professor of Sociology, UCLA

Precarity and Belonging is a marvelous and timely collection. The essays brilliantly explore how the increasing precarization of life impacts the social and physical mobility of both citizens and noncitizens, blurring the boundaries between them and thus making possible a politics of commonality.”
~ Jonathan Xavier Inda, Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign