Published & Forthcoming
Violence and the Urban: Theoretical Debates and Critical Perspectives
Andrea Román Alfaro & Ana Villarreal (Forthcoming)
in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Urban Research
Edited by Nausheen Anwar, Mark Davidson, Loretta Lees, Julie Miao, and Susan Moore
This chapter critically examines the multifaceted phenomenon of urban violence, highlighting theoretical debates and empirical insights from global and Latin American contexts. It begins by interrogating the concept of “urban violence,” revealing contested definitions that range from interpersonal crime to structural, symbolic, and state-inflicted harms. Two foundational approaches—the Chicago School and neo-Marxist perspectives—frame early debates: the former emphasizes social disorganization and weakened neighborhood control, while the latter situates violence within capitalist accumulation, dispossession, and neoliberal restructuring. Building on these foundations, the chapter explores the social consequences of violence, showing how fear, marginalization, and normative adaptations shape everyday life and urban space. A central focus is on state entanglements in Latin America, where policing, militarization, and hybrid governance regimes illustrate how violence is both a tool and an outcome of political authority. The chapter also foregrounds feminist contributions, expanding the scope of urban violence to include gendered, domestic, and intersectional harms, and emphasizing women’s strategies for survival and negotiation within violent urban environments. Concluding with future research directions, the chapter argues for understanding urban violence as a relational and processual phenomenon—produced, experienced, and governed through the city’s social, political, and economic structures—rather than as isolated acts of aggression, highlighting its centrality to broader questions of urban life, inequality, and governance.
Constructing the Foreigner:
Canadian Processes of Racialization around the “Latin American” Population Group
(Chapter 27)
Natalie Delia Deckard & Andrea Roman Alfaro (2023)
In Reading Sociology: Decolonizing Canada, Fourth Edition
Edited by Johanne Jean-Pierre, Vanessa Watts, Carl E. James, Patrizia Albanese, Xiaobei Chen, and Michael Graydon
Oxford University Press
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This new edition of Reading Sociology will bring together a collection of chapter authors and area experts who through their scholarship, activism, and practice are helping to reassess and re/narrate the colonial project that is Canada, and in doing so provide a new sociology of Canada. The proposed new edition will begin with a historical situating of Turtle Island as central to this narrative. The focus of the 4th edition of Reading Sociology will be on, as the co-editors say, "[aspects of] Canadian Sociology [which] need attention and thoughtful disruption."
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Desigualdad en la Academia: Mujeres en las Ciencias Sociales Peruanas
[Inequality in academia: women in the Peruvian social sciences]
Edited by Lorena Alcázar & Maria Balarin (2018)
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Alcazar, Lorena, Maria Balarin, and Andrea Roman. “Oportunidades y barreras en la trayectoria de la científicas sociales peruanas” [Opportunities and barriers in the trajectory of Peruvian women social scientists]. (pp. 51-102) Guibert, Yamile and Andrea Roman Alfaro. “Insertándose al mundo académico? Mujeres jóvenes en la docencia universitaria” [Entering the academic world? Young women in university teaching]. (pp. 229-264) This book examines inequalities between women and men in social sciences research and university teaching in Peru. Using rigorous and cutting-edge evidence, this book assesses gender disparities in the professional trajectories of social science academics. The chapters analyze the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) mechanisms of discrimination in higher education and research institutions-which translate into disparate forms of work valuation-and consider the impact that the gender division of labour in care work has on the professional lives of women and men. The studies also address differences by age, type of institution, and geographic location. The book concludes analyzing gender equality policy models promoted by higher education institutions around the world. Gender inequality in academia, in fact, exist, and leads to the loss of talent and richness of perspectives in the way we approach social problems. |