My name is Andrea Roman-Alfaro (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. |
In my first book project, At the Crosslines of Violence: Women, Meaning-making, and Power in Peru’s Urban Margins, I argue that the experiences of women residing at the urban margins expose the interconnections between the material and cultural dimensions of violence and challenge the conventional divide between violence in the public and private spheres. In particular, the book highlights how race, gender, and class relations shape the physical acts of violence that women endure and the cultural narratives that sustain and reproduce these acts.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, At the Crosslines of Violence proposes a three-dimensional approach to the study of violence that centers women’s experiences and examines the connections between the material and cultural nature of violence, the public and private spheres, and the individual, community, and state scales. |