Introduction
I am an Assistant Professor in Modern Latin American History at Leiden University. I hold a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies.
My research deals with the gendered, racialised and generational impacts of targeted social protection programmes. The efficacy of social assistance in achieving quantifiable development outcomes has received much attention while turning a blind eye to the broader systemic consequences of these programmes. My research moves beyond policy evaluations of such outcomes. Instead, it seeks to explore the potential role of social protection in perpetuating rather than attenuating existing exclusion and power differentials in Latin America, reproducing various forms of discrimination, domination, oppression, and social fragmentation. It also addresses the normative and material dimensions of redistributive social policies in a context of limited fiscal capacity, engaging with critical questions regarding the financing of social policies and programmes including high levels of indebtedness in the region next to tax evasion.
In my most recent paper, Falling through the cracks: digital infrastructures of social protection in Ecuador, published in Development and Change (2021), I study the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate digital infrastructures, particularly data infrastructures such as social registries, that are used to target Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVID-related programme Bono de Protección Familiar. While in my paper, Institutionalising Segregation: Women, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Paid Employment in Southern Ecuador, Population and Development Review (2019), I question perversity claims associated with cash transfers and flag processes of gender segregation in the labour market. My research contributes to interdisciplinary work on development studies, with a focus on social policy. Situated within development studies and informed by political economy, anthropology of the state, and sociology of gender and race; it seeks to understand how social policy shapes social and political identities. To that aim, I have adopted an intersectional approach, attentive to gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity. Most of my empirical research has focused on Ecuador, though I have written more broadly about Latin America.
Expert
I am an Assistant Professor in Modern Latin American History at Leiden University. I hold a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies. My research deals with the gendered, racialised and generational impacts of targeted social protection programmes. The efficacy of social assistance in achieving quantifiable development outcomes has received much attention while turning a blind eye to the broader systemic consequences of these programmes. My research moves beyond policy evaluations of such outcomes. Instead, it seeks to explore the potential role of social protection in perpetuating rather than attenuating existing exclusion and power differentials in Latin America, reproducing various forms of discrimination, domination, oppression, and social fragmentation. It also addresses the normative and material dimensions of redistributive social policies in a context of limited fiscal capacity, engaging with critical questions regarding the financing of social policies and programmes including high levels of indebtedness in the region next to tax evasion.
In my most recent paper, Falling through the cracks: digital infrastructures of social protection in Ecuador, published in Development and Change (2021), I study the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate digital infrastructures, particularly data infrastructures such as social registries, that are used to target Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVID-related programme Bono de Protección Familiar. While in my paper, Institutionalising Segregation: Women, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Paid Employment in Southern Ecuador, Population and Development Review (2019), I question perversity claims associated with cash transfers and flag processes of gender segregation in the labour market.
Fields of expertise: Gender equality, Social protection