Journal Articles
Making Sense of Violence Through Women's Experiences: Meaning-making, gendering, and racialization at Peru's Urban Margins
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This article examines how cultural frameworks shape interpretations of women’s experiences of violence. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Puerto Nuevo, a Peruvian shantytown, the study explores how residents, communities, and state actors ascribe meaning to violence through shared cultural logics of gendering and racialization. Two interwoven cultural processes emerge: gendering, which reinforces societal norms of masculinity and femininity, and racialization, which constructs racial categories and stereotypes. Participants’ interpretations of violence are deeply rooted in normative conceptions of gender and race, often blaming women for the violence they and their communities endure while framing poor, racialized residents as inherently violent. By analyzing the cultural dimensions of violence through women’s experiences, this study pushes criminological literature beyond individual or group-based (e.g., offenders, victims) analysis to examine the broader social structures shaping societal understandings of violence. Bridging cultural sociology and criminology, the study reveals how gendered and racialized meanings of violence extend beyond specific groups and contexts, reinforcing structural inequalities. Recognizing these processes is crucial for addressing systemic violence and its disproportionate impact on marginalized women.
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See It Through My Eyes
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If you had to show your life through images, what would you take pictures of? Images let us tell and see stories we could never access otherwise. For people living at the urban margins, whose lives are usually portrayed through the crime section of the evening news, photos can be a powerful tool to make sense of place and autonomy amidst the constraints of poverty and violence. With this in mind, we embarked on a journey to narrate a different story of one of Peru’s oldest and most criminalized shantytowns, Puerto Nuevo.
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Building the Settler-Colonial Order:
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In this article we focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people in "Canada." We theorize narratives that police employ to respond to this violence. Using a broad data sample of testimonies across "Canada," this article contributes to understanding how police (in)actions make sense of, justify, and dismiss violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people. We draw from 48 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Indigenous peoples in Toronto and other "Canadian" cities and 219 testimonies from the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (NIMMIWG). The analysis finds that police repeatedly use similar frames (topics), styles (linguistic and behavioral strategies), and storylines (narratives) to respond to violence against Indigenous peoples. While framing Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people as deviants helps police make sense of and explain violence against them, the use of verbal and behavioral strategies (indifference, callousness, and lack of information) and storylines ("they were [insert pathologizing frame]" and "there's nothing we can do") allows police to dismiss and justify acts of violence. We argue that the frames, styles, and storylines employed by police perpetuate violence. Police (in)actions are fundamental to achieving settler colonialism’s ideological and material dimensions
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Unravelling the School Punitive Web:
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Education researchers and policymakers popularized the “school-to-prison pipeline” metaphor to understand the connection between school failure and youth incarceration in the U.S. However, the metaphor has been criticized for simplifying schools’ role in creating and enlarging the carceral state. Based on Latina girls’ experiences attending a community day school in California, this study shows how alternative education programs facilitate the annexation of schools within the criminal justice system, enclosing Latina girls in a gendered web of punitive threads. Alternative education and its programs are best understood as shadow carceral innovations that expand the carceral state beyond prison walls.
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Pedagogy of Love and Care:
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Critical pedagogy scholars have described teaching as an act of love. This love is not a trivial emotion but a conscious action that demonstrates care, respect, honesty, listening, and solidarity. However, translating love and other principles of critical pedagogy into the classroom can be complex and painful. This paper discusses our pedagogical experiences of love and care inside and outside classrooms. Our reflections on working in a juvenile detention center and a food justice mutual aid project show how understanding love, care, and solidarity as actions have been essential for working with our communities. At the same time, our experiences pose questions about the complexities and possibilities of loving and caring in precarious and totalitarian circumstances. We contribute to thinking about the application of critical pedagogy beyond school classrooms.
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Experiencia Educativa y Tolerancia Política:
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The fate of a democracy depends, in part, on the “intrinsic commitment of ordinary people with respect to various democratic principles” (Welzel & Inglehart, 2009, p. 297). This article seeks to identify if having studied more semesters in university would be a factor of influence concerning higher levels of political tolerance or, if rather, the inclusion of a curricular proposal that explicitly addresses contents on citizenship and democracy would have a greater effect. The results indicate that a course oriented to question them about their citizenship exercise would have a positive and significant effect in their levels of political tolerance, as opposed to the number of accumulated academic semesters.
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