Book project

Working on Violence: Women and the Making of Everyday Life at the Urban Margins
Andrea Roman-Alfaro

What role do women play in the production and management of violence at the urban margins? Focusing on a marginalized urban neighborhood in Callao, Peru, I examine how women navigate the convergence of historical racialized inequality, gendered expectations, domestic violence, criminal conflict, and the state’s alternating forms of abandonment and punishment. Rather than positioning women solely as victims, caregivers, or resisters, the book traces the everyday work through which women anticipate danger, interpret risk, mediate conflicts, protect others, negotiate with institutions, and, at times, deploy or reproduce violence themselves. I call this gendered violence work: the labor through which women work on violence across the household, neighborhood, and state, attempting to contain its effects and sustain the continuity of everyday life. 

Under Review

Justifying Exception: Moral Pragmatics and the Legitimacy of Emergency Governance
Andrea Roman-Alfaro

This article examines how coercive crime control and emergency governance become legitimate among the populations most exposed to their harms. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Callao—the district with the second-highest homicide rate in Peru—the study develops the concept of moral pragmatics to explain how states of emergency (SoEs) are justified, experienced, and collectively endorsed in democratic contexts marked by insecurity and institutional constraints. I identify a three-part mechanism through which SoEs become intelligible: moral necessity, moral protection, and moral consent. These mechanisms show that legitimacy is a relational, processual accomplishment rooted in everyday reasoning and affective experience. The findings extend theories of legitimacy in policing and punishment by showing how coercion becomes embedded in democratic governance.

Motherwork at Lethal Intersections: How Intersection Violence Reorganizes Care
Andrea Roman-Alfaro

Although scholarship on violence at the urban margins has documented how residents, especially men, navigate chronic insecurity, and research on maternal labor has examined women’s strategies to respond to specific forms of violence, we know less about women’s experiences and the work they do when multiple forms of violence converge in everyday life at the urban margins. Building on the concept of motherwork, this article argues that such conditions reorganize women’s labor into interconnected practices of care, protection, pedagogy, physical discipline, institutional negotiation, and outright confrontation. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 38 interviews, and 12 focus groups in Callao, Peru, I show how mothers in Puerto Nuevo—a marginalized urban neighborhood—navigate overlapping criminal, domestic, sexual, state, and structural violence by weaving anticipation of violence, cultivation of interpretive skills and moral judgment, and negotiating and confronting violence. Rather than simply intensifying maternal labor, lethal intersections transform its forms and functions. Consequently, motherwork becomes simultaneously anticipatory, pedagogical, and morally ambivalent, as mothers protect and constrain, resist and accommodate, and challenge and reproduce patriarchal and institutional authority. By theorizing motherwork from the Latin American urban margins, the article extends Black feminist theories of care and parenting scholarship beyond the Global North and shifts attention from men to women as managers of violence at the urban margins.

Reframing the Urban Margins: Participatory Photography and Youth Agency amidst Violence in Peru
Andrea Roman-Alfaro & Paula Reyes Santander

In Participatory Approaches to Research on Violence in Latin America
Edited by Yanilda González & Anjuli Fahlberg
(Under contract with Oxford University Press)

This chapter examines how participatory research can challenge stigmatized narratives of marginalized urban communities by centering the voices of young people in Puerto Nuevo, an Asentamiento Humano in Callao, the district with the second-highest homicide rate in Peru. Using photography workshops, focus groups, and interviews with youth aged 8–25, the study highlights how participants document daily life, social bonds, communal spaces, and personal aspirations. The process of reclaiming representation was gradual, as youth confronted negative portrayals they had internalized and began to foster pride in their community. Photographs served as tools for discussion, guided by a field team of local residents who co-created and validated research instruments. Their dual role—as insiders and researchers—revealed both the strengths and tensions of participatory approaches, at times reinforcing stigma while generating nuanced insights. By positioning youth as co-creators of knowledge, the chapter demonstrates how participatory methodologies foster agency, contest exclusionary narratives, and illuminate the complexities of life amidst violence.