Award-Winning Scholar and Educator on Transnational Feminism & Human Rights
Welcome! I am a 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 also co-founded the University of California Digital Investigations Network. I earned my PhD from the Department of Sociology with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 2025, I became the President of the Sociologists for Women in Society, one of the most important feminist sociological associations based in the United States.
My first 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 most recent book, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship, is now available.
I won the 2020 Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching in the Division of Social Sciences.
Book Accolades
Praise for Human Rights Counterpublics
Read a Q&A about the book with the author.
“Falcón writes from the heart. Intimately disarming and highly accessible, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú productively reframes Perú’s incomplete transitional justice process, with clear global implications. This remarkable decolonial feminist journey through artist and activist memory recovery reveals the transformative potential of human rights counterpublics.”–Pascha Bueno-Hansen, author of Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Perú
About the cover image: Photo of participatory artistic project by Mauricio Delgado Castillo titled “Lxs libertadorxs, Contramonumento.” The horse emulates a monument to José de San Martin who helped secure Peruvian independence from the Spanish Empire. The horse here, unlike the one of the monument, has no rider, no hero, provoking viewers to debate the Peruvian national imaginary. Inviting the general public to occupy the place of San Martín on the horse is an intervention that highlights the diversity of struggles and peoples of Perú and to acknowledge the liberation of the Peruvian republic is everyone’s responsibility. This photograph features artist Venuca Evanán.
Praise for Power Interrupted
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