Research on Activism, Human Rights, and Politics

My research program has long been interested in feminist activism and human rights. My award-winning book Power Interrupted examined how women activists from the Américas have expanded global level discussions about the conceptualization of racism and antiracism. This research bridges the academic concept of intersectionality with its activist application to underscore how even the language of human rights has to better integrate antiracism.

I have expanded this research in collaboration with Professor Shelly Grabe of Psychology at UC Santa Cruz to research the Peruvian feminist movement, and how key leaders from government, academia, grassroots organizations, advocacy groups, and indigenous communities have created one of the most vibrant movements in South America.

Research on Post-Conflict Perú

In August 2003, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report in which they stated an estimated 70,000 people (overwhelmingly from indigenous communities as 75% were Native speakers of Quechua or other indigenous language) had been killed and disappeared during the internal conflict of 1980-2000. This research project investigates the shift from a context of rampant and widespread human rights violations to human rights realizations in the post-conflict/transitional justice period. I am particularly interested in understanding how citizen-subjects form counterpublics – oppositional spaces to the dominant culture shaped by racial, patriarchal, and class-based hierarchies — to reclaim and reinterpret human rights for the purposes of progressive social and cultural transformation. This research will be the basis of my second sole-authored book.

Digital Human Rights Investigations

In Fall 2019, I launched the Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz. This research lab is housed at the Research Center for the Americas (RCA) at UC Santa Cruz and is part of a UC Network for Human Rights and Digital Fact- Finding (sponsored by the University of California MRPI and other notable funders) with the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, School of Law and the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA, School of Law. The Lab offers digital verification support to non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners that are conducting open source investigations. The Lab’s social justice mission is to track and monitor ongoing humanitarian, environmental and socio-political crises throughout the Americas by using open source investigative methods to promote accountability.