My name is Andrea Roman-Alfaro. My pronouns are she/ella. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of New Mexico. I have a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Toronto.
I was born and raised in the coastal province of Callao. My family roots are in the Peruvian northern Andes, northern Lima, and the south of Spain. I have lived in Norway, the United States and, most recently, Tkaronto [Toronto] in Canada. I currently reside in Albuquerque, the traditional territories of the Pueblo of Sandia. My research agenda looks at how social structures shape people's interpretations, experiences, and responses to violence. I study violence by examining, what I called, its horizontal (how violence moves across private and public spaces) and vertical (how violence moves across individual, community, and societal scales) dimensions. In particular, I focus on marginalized women’s experiences of violence to understand the social dynamics and political processes that make violence possible. My research has been published in Gender & Society, Social Justice, Curriculum Inquiry, and the International Journal of Education for Social Justice. |
My first book project, The Politics of Lethality: Women, Violence, and Survival at the Urban Margins of Peru, offers a critical examination of how violence operates in Callao, Peru by centering the experiences of women at the urban margins.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, The Politics of Lethality argues that violence is both material and cultural, driven by physicality and entrenched notions of race, gender, and class, while challenging the conventional division between public and private forms of violence. By emphasizing the horizontal and vertical dimensions of violence, the book creates a new framework for understanding how violence is sustained in Latin America and beyond. |