I am a feminist researcher focusing on women’s rights in Latin America, particularly Ecuador and the Andean region. My work aims to understand how women interact with laws, projects, and institutions. I am interested in how women react, adapt, and/or normalise behaviours to survive, endure or disrupt hierarchical and subordinative power structures. My research follows a feminist and decolonial epistemology and relies on ethnographic, archival and arts-based (collaborative) research methods. I hold an MSc in Latin American Development and a PhD in Gender and Development from King’s College London. Before working as an academic, I worked as a journalist in Ecuador.
My doctoral research titled ‘Cuesta arriba y siguiendo el chaquiñán. Indigenous women’s path through violence in plurilegal Ecuador’ examines indigenous women’s interaction with two legal systems (state law and indigenous justice). It asks questions about indigenous justice, women’s rights, and inequality reproduction based on gendered and racialised expectations. As part of my research, I presented a photographic exhibition to open a discussion about hybridity in the Ecuadorian Andes. After finishing my PhD, I developed an arts-based research project titled ‘Portraying indigenous women: Between endurance and resistance’ funded by Visual Embodied Methodologies (VEM) network.
I have worked at King’s College London as a Lecturer on International Relations and Gender (Department of War Studies). In 2022, I joined the ‘Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health After World War II’ research team as a postdoctoral fellow (2022-2024) with a project enquiring how socialism has shaped and continues to shape sexual and reproductive health rights in Latin America, particularly in Ecuador and Peru. My research project focuses on the circulation of political discourses from governments and political leaders vis-à-vis the narratives created by feminist unions and socialist committees. It aims to historicise the expansion of infrastructure and coverage of public health services in connection with the health cultures produced by socialism, using a gender lens. Currently (2024), I am an LSE Fellow in Human Rights, Politics and Gender.
E: a.espinoza-carvajal@lse.ac.uk
IG: andreaespcar
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).
Espinoza Carvajal, A (2019). Book Review: Carolina Borda-Niño-Wildman, The Medicalisation of Incest and Abuse: Biomedical and Indigenous Perceptions in Rural Bolivia. Journal of Latin American Studies, 51 (2).
IN PREPARATION:
Espinoza Carvajal, A., Fonseca, S. Forthcoming 2026. Special Issue Global Histories of Community Health. In Bulletin of the History of Medicine. As editors, we based the accepted proposal on an in-person workshop with collaborators in Cholula, Mexico (December 2022).
