About

Sylvanna Falcon is an award-winning author and educator who serves as a Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the founder and director of the Human Rights Digital Investigations Lab at the university. Her research focuses on transnational feminism, human rights, and transitional justice in Latin America, with particular attention to Peru. Falcon has authored significant works including her first book, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, which won the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association, and her second book, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú: Contesting Tiers of Citizenship. She has also co-edited volumes on feminism, labor, migration, and noncitizenship. Falcon has been recognized for her outstanding teaching with the 2020 Golden Apple Award at UC Santa Cruz and has served as a consultant for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. In 2022, she led a campus campaign to rename the Research Center for the Americas in honor of civil rights and feminist icon Dolores Huerta. Her teaching interests include transnational feminism, human rights, Peru, qualitative feminist methods, and transitional justice in Latin America.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Engineering
• Gender studies
• Business
• Geography
• Law
• Economic geography

Selected publications

• How Decolonial Feminism Can Disrupt End-Times Fascism

  Gender & Society · 2026-03-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Since January 2025, monumental anti-democratic actions led by the U.S. government have occurred at a disorienting pace for the world. We are experiencing an apocalyptic version of a far-right ideology that has been referred to as “end-times fascism,” in which global power becomes consolidated for the very few but destruction is the result for the majority of the world, effectively extinguishing hope for a better future. Drawing inspiration from the work of decolonial feminist theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui of Bolivia, this essay calls for us to recognize that we—both the ancestral and the present we—can confront this kind of strongmen. Resistance at different levels that engages with a decolonial feminist practice will embolden us to move with courage, with renewed hope, with each other, and to be en route to reimagining the path of a collective feminist future.

  PublisherDOI

• Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2024-09-10

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This book seeks to build on feminist and decolonial approaches to transitional justice through a focus on human rights counterpublics in Perú. Counterpublics, or oppositional spaces, movements, and communities challenging the status quo, are essential for rupturing the silences that exist about the Peruvian internal conflict (circa 1980–2000). As Perú is a nation-state fundamentally shaped by Spanish settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide, displacement, and slavery, a decolonial feminist lens will enable us to see most clearly how a just future might—and must—be built in the twenty-first century. Drawing from decolonial feminism, transformative memory is about seeking a societal change that is much deeper and more meaningful than what liberal reforms could ever offer to communities that have experienced repression. The book focuses on three key arenas in which to explore this transformation: public art and community education projects; public commemoration events about the internal conflict; and domestic labor advocacy efforts on behalf of and with displaced communities. Through decolonial feminism we can begin to reconceptualize human rights—its multifaceted meanings, promise, and limitations—in order to remember and reimagine Perú itself. <italic>Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú</italic> centers artistic and activist praxes led by counterpublics, as these interventions are best equipped to imagine the more capacious forms of decolonial healing and transformation that the liberal, transitional state cannot.

  PublisherDOI

• Backlash to Building Human Rights Memory

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2024-09-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides the history of the Peruvian internal conflict and addresses the backlash to memory making. Art projects supported by counterpublics have been attacked and vandalized since the official end of the internal conflict. This chapter discusses two public art projects that have been intentionally targeted: the mural on a building of a human rights organization that portrays a past and future Perú, as well as the memorial El Ojo Que Llora (The Eye That Cries), which commemorates the lives lost during the internal conflict. These public art projects serve as a method of fostering unspoken difficult dialogues, revealing a schism between empathy and hostility that unleashes the power to suppress memories.

  PublisherDOI

• Intersectionality and transnational power in the US asylum process

  2023-02-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter considers how the institutional power that is part of the US asylum process for claims of gender-based violence undermines intersectionality even though this particular legal process is meant to “see women.” By exploring the asylum application quandary for cases of gender-based violence specifically, it discusses the process of drafting a declaration and explain how it relies on colonial logics to have any persuasion with a review committee. The declaration that is part of the asylum application process on gender-based violence is a deeply flawed one as it not only relies on simplistic framing, but is allergic to nuance or situational context. One can be from a community that strives to address gender-based violence at the community level, not through the police, and yet the situation is so grave that safety and security are still not viable, forcing one to flee to the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Toward a Politics of Commonality: The Nexus of Mobility, Precarity, and (Non)citizenship

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2021

  • Political Science
  • Political Science

  This series publishes books that deepen and expand our understanding of Latina/o populations, especially

  DOI

• From Contract to Tenure

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• We Have an Obligation to Speak About Human Rights

  2019-07-09

  book-chapter

  Norma Martínez is host and co-producer of Informativo Pacifica, an international and Spanish language radio news program on KPFK, a Los Angeles, California, community radio station. Her program focuses on the struggles of labor, women, indigenous peoples and peace activists, including resistances to neoliberalism and militarism across the Americas. In Latin America we are seeing changes that I think are very difficult to see in the United States. In Argentina when the change in presidents happened about six years ago, there were protests, there were mobilizations and how they gave rise to a more progressive political sector. We have seen important changes; one case the author wants to mention is that in Argentina, now there is a law according to the United Nations. It is called The Communications Law, that divides, that terminates the communications media monopolies. It divides [the media up into] three parts: the private media, the public media and the non-profit media.

  PublisherDOI

• Critical Representation within ‘Cultures of Domination’

  2019-07-09

  book-chapter

  Peter Bratt is a director, screenwriter and producer who resides in San Francisco, California. His second film, La MISSION, is about a reformed inmate and recovering alcoholic named Che who has worked hard to redeem his life. Many Native spiritual leaders believe that the disharmony of the world is really an imbalance between masculine and feminine energy, or masculine and feminine principles. Those two forces really make the creation what it is – what makes it vital and alive. The two primary forces are what also makes us human, makes the plants grow, calls the rain and the sunshine. In that way, the film explores different issues of domestic violence perpetrated against women; it looks at homophobia and to some degree class and race because within a culture of domination, all those things are connected.

  PublisherDOI

• A Feminist World is Possible

  2019-07-09

  book-chapter

  This chapter provides a snapshot of the existing diversity of voices on human rights that foregrounds the important relational work among practitioners and critics, which enable these alternative framings. Through interviews, a speech excerpt and a report from the field, the chapter explores visionary perspectives derived from the activism of prominent community radio hosts, scholar-activists and an independent filmmaker. World magazine further explained that the cause of the Abu Ghraib prison crisis was feminism because feminism causes women to become disoriented about their gender roles, join the army and abuse prisoners. The anti-violence movement that the way to end gender violence. Sexual violence is the strategy by which Native peoples become marked as inherently rapeable, and by extension their lands inherently invade-able and their resources inherently extractable.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Molly Talcott

  California State University Los Angeles

  12 shared

• Dana Collins

  Montefiore Medical Center

  11 shared

• Sharmila Lodhia

  Santa Clara University

  11 shared

• Steven C. McKay

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2 shared

• Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  2 shared

• Juan Poblete

  2 shared

• Catherine S. Ramírez

  1 shared

• J. Wright

  Florida International University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s…
• Golden Apple Award for outstanding teaching in the Division…
• President, Sociologists for Women in Society (2024-2026)
• PI, Mellon Foundation, "Dolores Huerta's Legacy and Shaping…
• PI, New Venture Fund, Public Interest Technology, "Instituti…