About

Jessaca Leinaweaver is a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She conducts research in cultural anthropology and anthropological demography within Peru and the Peruvian diaspora. Her work has focused on informal child fostering in the urban Andes, aging in Andean Peru, and transnational adoption and migration from Peru to Spain. She has published extensively on these topics and is the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award for her first book, The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru, which explores informal child fostering and child migration in the urban Andes. Her second book, Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain, analyzes the similarities between international migration and adoption and examines the impacts on transracial adoptees relocating to diverse societies with significant immigrant populations. Her field research has been supported by several prestigious organizations, including the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political science
• Gender studies
• History
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Encoding family struggles through Peruvian child welfare practice: Microbiographic insights from an alternative care database

  Human Organization · 2025-06-13

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• Résister à l’absence dans l’adoption, avant et après

  Communications · 2025-10-13

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Working together, learning apart: a multicommunity study in rural Peru

  Ethnography & Education · 2024-04-02

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Care and Agency

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2024-08-13

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  Andean communities occupy a special place in the history of anthropology, having given shape to fundamental theories of kinship, peasant economics, Indigenous medical systems, ritual life and others. Yet children have been shortchanged in research and theory building. Care and Agency , based on detailed ethnographies of six towns in the province of Yauyos, restores children to a central research position. Contemporary children’s studies emphasize children’s agency and autonomy, and these take surprising forms under the conditions of the rural Andes. At the same time, the book incorporates and extends current discussions of caregiving and its organization in human societies. Children in the Andes are involved in the care of each other, of adults, of animals, of the environment. The activities, sociality, and subjective states of children of different ages, genders, and social strata are variable in ways that make it impossible to speak of a single Andean childhood. The future they face is also uncertain, as the Peruvian nation stumbles through cycles of incompetent government whose common thread is the neglect of small-scale family farming and the welfare of rural populations. This book is a fascinating look at Andean childhood for anyone interested in the lives of children.

  PublisherDOI

• Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture

  Museum Anthropology · 2024-02-25

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Understanding and documenting the ways that objects become entangled in, produce, sustain, and rupture family relations are crucial contributions of museum studies to anthropological kinship theory. This article analyzes a Canadian exhibit entitled “Family: Bonds and Belonging,” developed in response to Canada's 150th anniversary, in 2017, by a British Columbia provincial museum, then brought to Canada's national immigration museum in Nova Scotia in 2019. The article demonstrates how curators invite objects to narrate kinship, and entangle visitors as theoretical accomplices, all while building national projects. Layered concepts of “family” plays a central role in this exhibit, simultaneously introducing “family” as complex, diverse, and varied while also reproducing middle‐class conventions of family. I argue that this contradiction partly undercuts the representational content of the exhibit, and that the simultaneous multivalence and ideological uniformity of family in this setting points to how museum practices and procedures can unintentionally reproduce conventional ideas that implicitly counter curatorial work.

  PublisherDOI

• La educación rural y sus micro contextos: Lecciones de Yauyos

  Revista Peruana de Investigación Educativa · 2024-03-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Este artículo se basa en un estudio etnográfico en seis localidades altoandinas de la provincia de Yauyos, región Lima. Una información muy variada muestra cómo el funcionamiento de las instituciones educativas es afectado por su articulación con los procesos económicos, sociopolíticos y culturales de los micro contextos donde se ubican. Las múltiples interconexiones con las instituciones, actores y prácticas locales condicionan la posibilidad de introducir reformas. El desprestigio de la vida rural aparece como algo aprendido que entra en conflicto con el deseo de muchos niños, niñas y adolescentes de continuar, bajo el supuesto de mejoras tecnológicas, frente a emprendimientos agropecuarios. El estudio resalta la importancia de los conocimientos y capacidades adquiridas fuera de la escuela.

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• Care and Agency

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2024-10-11

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• El regreso de la migración silenciosa: adopción internacional, raza y diferencia

  Revista del Museo de Antropología · 2023-08-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Los demógrafos consideran a la adopción internacional principalmente como un tipo inusual de migración. Esta perspectiva ofrece a los antropólogos nuevas formas de pensar sobre el parentesco. Basándose en el cuerpo de trabajo demográfico y en los estudios antropológicos sobre parentesco y migración, este artículo desarrolla un enfoque nuevo e híbrido para abordar la adopción internacional como un proceso social complejo el cual es, al mismo tiempo, migratorio y productivo de parentesco. Ver la adopción internacional como una forma de migración revela el hecho de que los “factores de empuje” y los “factores de atracción” del hecho no se alinean de manera perfecta. Utilizando una perspectiva antropológica del curso de vida, el artículo explora cómo las experiencias de estos “migrantes” y las personas cercanas a ellos, a lo largo del tiempo, se pueden comprender no únicamente como producto de la migración, sino también como racialización. Observar las vidas de las personas adoptadas a través de la lente de la migración revela algunas de las incomodidades persistentes que impiden tener conversaciones abiertas sobre la diferencia racial y el estatus de minoría en el contexto adoptivo, es decir, un contexto donde los niños han sido forzados a migrar, integrados a familias. Este artículo se basa en datos de trabajo de campo etnográfico con padres españoles que han adoptado niños peruanos para construir el argumento de que la adopción internacional es un tipo de migración particular que produce una categoría minoritaria dentro de una población mayoritaria.

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• Chapter 5. Disappearance via Adoption: On Missing Children in Spain (1936–96)

  Berghahn Books · 2023-08-31

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• Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, Political Children: Violence, Labor, and Rights in Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 266 pp.; hardcover $85, paperback and ebook $28.

  Latin American Politics and Society · 2023-12-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, Political Children: Violence, Labor, and Rights in Peru. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 266 pp.; hardcover 28. - Volume 66 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Transnational Adoptees and Migrants: From Peru to Spain

  NSF · $255k · 2010–2014

Frequent coauthors

• Diana Marre

  Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

  8 shared

• Mary Weismantel

  5 shared

• Susan E. Frekko

  5 shared

• Linda J. Seligmann

  George Mason University

  5 shared

• Amy Lind

  Institute of Peruvian Studies

  4 shared

• Gonzalo Portocarrero

  Pacific University

  4 shared

• Patricia Hammer

  4 shared

• Susan Paulson

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Margaret Mead Award