About
Andrea Espinoza Carvajal is a feminist researcher focusing on women's rights in Latin America, particularly in the Andean region. Her work aims to understand how women interact with laws, projects, and institutions. She is interested in how women react, adapt, and/or normalise behaviours to survive, endure or disrupt hierarchical and subordinative power structures. Her research follows a feminist and decolonial epistemology and relies on ethnographic, archival and arts-based (collaborative) research methods. Andrea holds an MSc in Latin American Development and a PhD in Gender and Development from King's College London. Before working as an academic, she worked as a journalist in Ecuador.
Expertise
Women’s Rights, Violence Against Women, Indigenous Justice and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
Research
In her doctoral research titled ‘Cuesta arriba y siguiendo el chaquiñán. Indigenous women’s path through violence in plurilegal Ecuador’, Andrea examined indigenous women’s interaction with two legal systems (state law and indigenous justice). Her work asked questions about indigenous justice, women’s rights, and inequality reproduction based on gendered and racialised expectations. As part of her research, she presented a photographic exhibition to open a discussion about hybridity in the Ecuadorian Andes. She also developed an arts-based research project titled 'Portraying Indigenous Women: Between Endurance and Resistance'funded by the Visual Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network.
In 2022, Andrea joined the ‘Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health After World War II’ research team as a postdoctoral fellow with a project enquiring how socialism has shaped and continues to shape sexual and reproductive health rights in Latin America, particularly in Ecuador. Her research project focused on the circulation of political discourses from governments and political leaders vis-à-vis the narratives created by feminist unions and socialist committees.
Teaching
Andrea teaches a course on Gender and Society.