Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal

Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal

LSE Fellow in Human Rights, Politics and Gender

Department of Sociology

Room No
OLD.3.15
Connect with me

Languages
English, Spanish
Key Expertise
Gender Studies, Latin American Studies

About me

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 Details

Women’s Rights; Violence Against Women; Indigenous Justice and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

Selected publications

Espinoza Carvajal, Andrea. 2024. “Entrapped in hollow choices. Indigenous women manoeuvring legal pluralism in Ecuador”. In Decolonising Andean Identities. Andinxs, activism and social change, edited by Rebecca Irons and Phoebe Martin. London: UCL Press.

Espinoza Carvajal, Andrea, and Luis Medina Cordova. 2024. Pandemic and Narration: COVID-19 Narratives in Latin America. Wilmington: Vernon Press.

Espinoza Carvajal, Andrea, and Luis Medina Cordova. 2024. “Everything is normal. Nothing is normal. Disruption and continuity in Guayaquil’s pandemic experience”. In Pandemic and Narration: COVID-19 Narratives in Latin America, edited by Andrea Espinoza Carvajal and Luis Medina Cordova. Wilmington: Vernon Press.

Mazzone, Antonella, Denizia Kawany Fulkaxò Cruz, Scorah Tumwebaze, Manari Ushigua, Philipp Trotter, Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, Roberto Schaeffer and Radhika Khosla. 2022. “Indigenous cosmologies of energy for a sustainable energy future”. Nature Energy 8: 19–29.

Boesten, Jelke, Andrea Espinoza Carvajal. 2022. “‘It is a very tough fight’: Abortion as a battleground over women’s rights in Latin America”. In Women Resisting Violence. Voices and Experiences from Latin America, edited by WRV Collective. London: Latin America Bureau.

Espinoza Carvajal, Andrea. 2020. “COVID-19 and the Limitations of Official Responses to Gender-Based Violence in Latin America: Evidence from Ecuador”. Bulletin of Latin America Research 39(S1): 7-11.

Espinoza Carvajal, Andrea. “Exploring the Use of Arts-Based Research in Social Science Academic Research: A Literature Review. Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network” (working paper, Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy, King’s College London, August 2020).

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 and PhD supervision

Andrea teaches a course on Gender and Society.