Andrea Roman Alfaro

Assistant Professor

Email:: amroman9@unm.edu
Phone:: 505-277-2501
Website

Education

Ph.D., Sociology, University of Toronto (2024)
M.A., Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2016)

Research Interests

Sociology of Violence, Criminalization, Gender, Race, Narratives, Political Sociology, Qualitative Methods, Participatory Action Research

Research Statement:

My research agenda explores how social structures shape people’s interpretations, experiences, and responses to violence. I examine violence by analyzing its horizontal dimension (how it moves across private and public spaces) and its vertical dimension (how it moves across individual, community, and societal scales). Specifically, I focus on the experiences of marginalized women. Since violence affects the structure of families and social relations, and women are central to these relations, their understandings and responses to violence provide insight into how violence occurs and is reproduced. My research is guided by three main questions: how do we make sense of violence?; how do we respond, resist, and heal from violence?; and how do class, race, and gender affect our definitions, experiences, and responses to violence? Together, these questions contribute to understanding the social dynamics and political processes that make violence possible.

Recent/Select Publications:

Roman Alfaro, Andrea. 2024. “See It Through My Eyes.” Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds., 23(2), 44–55.

Flores, Jerry, and Andrea Román Alfaro. 2023. “Building the Settler-Colonial Order: Police (in)action in Responding to Violence Against Indigenous Women in ‘Canada.’” Gender & Society, 37(3): 391-412.

Román Alfaro, Andrea, and Jerry Flores. 2022. “Unravelling the School Punitive Web: The School-to-Prison Pipeline in the Context of the Gendered Shadow Carceral State.” Social Justice. A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order, 48(3): 137-157.

Flores, Jerry, and Andrea Román Alfaro. 2022. “Pedagogy of Love and Care: Mutual Aid, Solidarity and Liberatory Education across the University.” Curriculum Inquiry, 52(3): 385-396.

Delia Deckard, Natalie, and Andrea Román Alfaro. 2022. “Constructing the Foreigner: Canadian Processes of Racialization around the ‘Latin American’ Population Group.” In Reading Sociology (4th edition): Unsettling a Settler Colonial Project and Re/writing Sociological Narratives, edited by J. JeanPierre; V. Watts; C. E. James; P. Albanese; X. Chen; M. Graydon. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Faculty Public Sociology & Community Engagement

Principal Investigator, See It Through My Eyes: Building Place and Autonomy at the Urban Margins, Community Participatory Photography Project, Callao, Peru.
Founder, Puerto Nuevo Youth Community Center, Callao, Peru

Awards:

Community Action Research Initiative Grant, American Sociological Association, 2023
Social Actions Initiative Award, Sociologists for Women in Society, 2023
Proyectos de Arte para la Transformación e Innovación Social [Art Projects for Social Transformation], Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, 2022