New additions to the research group

To inaugurate our Geypo blog, we would like you to get to know a little more about the new pre- and postdoctoral researchers who have recently joined the group. We tell you who they are and explain their main lines of research. And, if you want to know more about them, click here.

Laura Arranz is a pre-doctoral researcher FPU (Ministry of Universities Contract for the Training of University Staff), in the Department of Political Science and Administration at the Complutense University of Madrid. Degree in International Relations and Master in Contemporary Latin American Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has carried out a research stay at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has presented papers on her PhD work at several national and international conferences, including the 42nd Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies (ACIS) Conference, the VII Uruguayan Congress of Political Science (AUCIP), the VIII International Congress of Political Science (AMECIP) and the XV Spanish Congress of Political Science and Administration (AECPA). Her lines of research focus on right-wing studies, the anti-feminist and anti-gender character of the radical right, gender studies and political discourse.

Her doctoral thesis deals with the evolution of the gender equality policies of the Popular Party and the transformations in its discourse in the context of the emergence of the radical right in Spain.

Ana Ballesteros Pena is a postdoctoral researcher “Talent Attraction” in the Department of Political Science and Administration. She obtained her PhD thesis in Sociology in 2017 at the University of Barcelona with a research on gender equality policies in women’s prisons in Spain, which took as a case study the so-called “Respect Modules”. She has also been a Marie Curie researcher at the universities of A Coruña and Toronto (Canada) with the project “Governmigration”, focused on the analysis of migrant detention systems in Spain and Canada. Her main research interests are punishment and social control; border control; prisons and immigration detention; and feminist political analysis of public policies, especially those of a punitive nature.

In the coming years, she will continue to analyse the main challenges and paradoxes that emerge from the incorporation of equality policies in prisons and other detention spaces. She will also continue to explore the impact of the main instruments used for the management of irregular migration, specifically racialised violence at borders, the mutation of detention spaces and the effects of control and supervision techniques in the post-immigration detention period. Finally, the researcher will continue to participate in the R&D project “The responsibility of artificial intelligence: a challenge for criminal sciences” with the University of A Coruña.

Paloma Caravantes is a Juan de la Cierva-Formación postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Administration. In 2019 she received her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at Rutgers University, USA, with research on left-wing populism, gender and feminist politics. She has participated in research projects, as a member of the IMPLEMAD team, dedicated to analysing the implementation of intersectionality in municipal policies, and as a collaborator in the CASPER and UniSAFE projects, focusing on gender equality and gender-based violence policies in academia and research. Her research interests include the relationship between populism and feminism, the organisational culture of institutional and party politics, and the implementation of intersectionality and gender equality policies.

Her current postdoctoral project focuses on processes of democratisation and implementation of gender equality and intersectional policies at the local level, in a context of anti-gender opposition. In the coming years, Paloma will explore the hypothesis that the local sphere is a particularly fertile ground for the implementation of feminist policies, due to the capacity of local administrations to reorganise political priorities and redistribute resources in a more equitable, inclusive and intersectional way, their competences of proximity to citizens, as well as their capacity to generate spaces for participation, deliberation and citizen control over public services.

Bruna Cristina Jaquetto Pereira is a researcher in the UNA4CAREER postdoctoral programme at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). Her main line of research is related to issues of gender and race/ethnicity intersectionality.

Her current research project, IntersectGE, adopts an intersectional perspective to investigate sexual harassment against immigrant and racial/ethnic minority women in universities and research centres in the EU, particularly in Spain. Previous studies point out that gender-based violence occurs at various levels of universities and research organisations and is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality. It is also recognised that discrimination against immigrants and on grounds of racial or ethnic origin permeates all areas of life, including education, and is perceived as the most widespread form of discrimination in the EU. Both academic literature and EU technical documents underline the need for research on gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, that focuses on the experiences of minority groups and addresses multiple axes of inequality and discrimination that are distinct but relevant to exposure and vulnerability to violence. IntersectGE will conduct multi-level research that will go a step further to fill this gap in knowledge and action. The translation of the findings into tools and recommendations for universities, research organisations and policy makers will contribute to addressing multiple and intersecting discriminations simultaneously and to adopting intersectionality in policy making.

Lucrecia Rubio Grundell is a UNA4CAREER postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Administration of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she is developing her project entitled “Opposition to gender+ equality in Europe and the role of the European Union”. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute of Florence, where she defended her doctoral thesis in 2018 with the title “The dynamics of securitisation and de-securitisation of EU anti-trafficking policies: the case of trafficking in women for sexual exploitation”. Since then, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Free University of Brussels, participating in a project on values in European politics entitled “Governing values, governing through values, governing by values? The European Union as a politics of risk” (ValEUR); at the Autonomous University of Madrid, in the project “Women on the move and their right to a life free of violence and discrimination: recommendations for a Madrid municipal policy with a human rights, gender and intersectionality approach”, and at the Complutense University of Madrid, in the UniSAFE project, dedicated to analysing gender-based violence and institutional responses to it in academia in order to build a knowledge base and operational tools to make universities and research organisations safe spaces. Her research interests revolve around the intersection between human rights, gender, intersectionality, migration and sex work, topics on which she has published in journals such as the European Journal of Women Studies or Social Politics.

Her current research project analyses a) the role of the EU as a stage and actor in the current dynamics of opposition to gender equality+ in Europe and b) the impact that this opposition has on its own dynamics of governance, public policy and political identity. To this end, the project analyses the political debate at the European level around four case studies: abortion, homophobia, surrogacy and trans rights, in order to identify which actors politicise such issues at EU level, in which institutions, why and how; whether the EU institutions themselves are involved in such debates and, if so, which ones, how and why; and what has been the outcome in terms of the backlash or strengthening of the EU’s gender equality+ policies; of the governance dynamics that characterise them and of the EU’s democratic and progressive credentials.

Beatriz Ranea Triviño is a postdoctoral researcher attached to the European Horizon 2020 UniSAFE project in the Department of Political Science and Administration of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. She obtained her PhD in Sociology and Anthropology in 2019 at the Complutense University of Madrid with a research on the analysis of the construction of masculinity in relation to the consumption of prostitution. Her research received the María Isidra de Guzmán Research Prize awarded by the City Council of Alcalá de Henares and the University of Alcalá; and the Accesit Ángeles Durán Prize for Scientific Innovation in the Study of Women and Gender awarded by the University Institute of Women’s Studies of the Autonomous University of Madrid. She completed the Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Hull (UK) and the University of Granada and participates as a lecturer in different postgraduate courses teaching subjects on Feminist Theory and Gender Studies. She is the author of the book “Disarming Masculinity. Los hombres ante la era del feminismo” (2021); she has edited “Feminismos. Antología de textos feministas para uso de las generaciones más jóvenes, y las que no son tanto” (2019) and coordinated, together with Rosa Cobo, the “Breve Diccionario de Feminismo” (2020) in the publishing house Los Libros de la Catarata.

The UniSAFE project she is currently working on focuses on analysing gender-based violence and institutional responses to it in academia in order to build a knowledge base and operational tools to make universities and research organisations safe spaces. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Sociology teaching in the Faculty of Information Sciences at UCM.

Rebecca Tildesley is a pre-doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and Administration at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). She joined UCM in September 2019, being a beneficiary of the Research Staff Training Grant from the Ministry of Science and Innovation (FPI-MICNN). She was part of the European-funded research project UNIGUAL “Equality policies in Spanish universities”, within the framework of the R&D Retos 2017 (Ref: Fem2017-86004-R) (2017-2021). She holds a Master’s degree in Women, Gender and Citizenship from the Inter-University Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies and a Master’s degree in Political Science Research from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona). She has undertaken a research stay as a postgraduate visiting researcher at the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Bristol.

Her PhD research deals with the implementation of gender equality policies in Spanish universities, focusing on the dynamics between resistances to change and feminist agency to push for feminist policy implementation and structural gender changes.