About

Susana Draper is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies whose research and teaching are centered on the relationship between cultural and political imagination in contemporary Latin American literatures and cultures. Her work emphasizes the prominent role of collective memory in fostering social transformation and dialogue across different temporalities. Her books analyze how art, culture, and concepts serve as spaces for activating imagination to resist violence and reconfigure notions of freedom. Her training in philosophy, Latin American literature, and cultural studies informs her perspective on cultural analysis as a space where intellectual, literary, and visual histories intersect to address fundamental questions of life as a political and historical being. Her recent publication, 'Libres y sin miedo. Horizontes feministas para construir otros sentidos de justicia' (2024), explores how conceptual frameworks of violence influence understandings of justice, emphasizing popular feminist movements, prison abolition, and social reproduction through a counter-archive of collective knowledges and practices. Draper is currently working on two book projects: one on artistic and philosophical reflections on bodies and territories affected by war, militarization, and displacement, and another on the conceptual contributions of critical Marxist women to dialectics, social reproduction, and liberation. Her scholarly work includes numerous publications, including books, articles, and edited volumes, that engage with themes of social justice, feminist performance, memory, and political imagination.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social Science
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Advertising
• Epistemology
• Business

Selected publications

• Temporalidad, imaginación política y potencialidad de la memoria. Entrevista con Susana Draper

  Cuadernos de teoría social. · 2024-08-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Entre octubre y diciembre de 2021 invité a Susana Draper a una conversación por correspondencia en el formato actual, que son los correos electrónicos. Generosamente Susana aceptó participar en este diálogo a fragmentos, interrumpido, recompuesto, pero de todas formas un diálogo. Le envié algunas preguntas iniciales y comenzamos el intercambio que fue dando paso a esta entrevista. Pese al aceleramiento en que vivimos, Susana me respondió en medio de la corrección de exámenes, toleró mis silencios y discontinuidades y cada vez respondió con extraordinaria prontitud. Había conocido a Susana en 2019, cuando durante una estadía en Vassar College asistí a una conferencia que ella dio sobre México del 68, presentando su crítica a la elaboración historiográfica que se centra en la memoria traumática de los acontecimientos. Posteriormente, asistí a un seminario de América Latina, donde Katherine Hite discutió con sus estudiantes en torno a la idea de constelaciones y su rendimiento conceptual para estudiar momentos críticos en la historia reciente en el trabajo de Susana. Esa estadía tuvo lugar la última quincena de octubre de 2019, por lo que las noticias de la revuelta de octubre en Chile me encontraron lejos de las calles de Valparaíso, donde resido, pero acompañada con estas dos académicas feministas y latinoamericanistas quienes hospedaron la perturbación de las primeras noticias recibidas sobre la movilización social y la consternación ante las violaciones de Derechos Humanos que comenzaban a conocerse.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Temporalidad, imaginación política y potencialidad de la memoria: Entrevista con Susana Draper

  Cuadernos de teoría social. · 2022-01-22

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Entre octubre y diciembre de 2021 invité a Susana Draper a una conversación por correspondencia en el formato actual, que son los correos electrónicos. Generosamente Susana aceptó participar en este diálogo a fragmentos, interrumpido, recompuesto, pero de todas formas un diálogo. Le envié algunas preguntas iniciales y comenzamos el intercambio que fue dando paso a esta entrevista. Pese al aceleramiento en que vivimos, Susana me respondió en medio de la corrección de exámenes, toleró mis silencios y discontinuidades y cada vez respondió con extraordinaria prontitud. Había conocido a Susana en 2019, cuando durante una estadía en Vassar College asistí a una conferencia que ella dio sobre México del 68, presentando su crítica a la elaboración historiográfica que se centra en la memoria traumática de los acontecimientos. Posteriormente, asistí a un seminario de América Latina, donde Katherine Hite discutió con sus estudiantes en torno a la idea de constelaciones y su rendimiento conceptual para estudiar momentos críticos en la historia reciente en el trabajo de Susana.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 1968 Mexico

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths toward Prison Abolition

  CLCWeb Comparative Literature and Culture · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  This article focuses on a small but crucial aspect of the question of gendered violence and the multiple injustices that feminist mobilizations have once again brought into mainstream discussion: how do we find ways out of women’s imprisonment and stop the abusive violence that permeates institutional and domestic spheres without relying on those same forms of violence as a solution to the problems we face? This is a question that comes from a long history of knowledge-praxis created by groups of radical Black feminist women, and women of color, trans, and queer people, working together on the problematization of gendered violence at both interpersonal and institutional levels. The experiences that I analyze share an emphasis on language and imagination, viewed as a resource for a long path toward liberation. This is something that I find inspiring and important to explore: how might small exercises in language and imagination generate new possibilities for creating different social relations and forms of collective, sustainable existence after imprisonment? Visualizing collective struggles by women who are and who were formerly imprisoned in different parts of South and North America enables us to see forms in the here and now that can lead us to a different future.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Business of Memory: Reconstructing Torture Centers as Shopping Malls and Tourist Sites

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Tejer cuidados a micro y macro escala entre lo público y lo común

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• 1968 Mexico

  2018-01-01 · 30 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Strike as Process

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2018-07-01 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article approaches the March 8 women’s strike as a kaleidoscope displaying the complexity of the rupture among different “feminisms.” Within this complex rupture, the figure of the strike, understood as an action, question, and process, was essential, as it turned into a space for a multiplicity of struggles and acts of meaning-making. In this space, the call for an international women’s strike effectuated a series of moves: rupture with respect to institutionalized feminism, connectivity in regard to latent movements of recent decades, and a revitalization of a history of subterranean forms of radical feminisms.

  PublisherDOI

• 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy

  2018-08-09 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Recognizing the fiftieth anniversary of the protests, strikes, and violent struggles that formed the political and cultural backdrop of 1968 across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Susana Draper offers a nuanced perspective of the 1968 movement in Mexico. She challenges the dominant cultural narrative of the movement that has emphasized the importance of the October 2nd Tlatelolco Massacre and the responses of male student leaders. From marginal cinema collectives to women's cooperative experiments, Draper reveals new archives of revolutionary participation that provide insight into how 1968 and its many afterlives are understood in Mexico and beyond. By giving voice to Mexican Marxist philosophers, political prisoners, and women who participated in the movement, Draper counters the canonical memorialization of 1968 by illustrating how many diverse voices inspired alternative forms of political participation. Given the current rise of social movements around the globe, in 1968 Mexico Draper provides a new framework to understand the events of 1968 in order to rethink the everyday existential, political, and philosophical problems of the present

  PublisherDOI

• Cartographies of affects

  2015-06-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In a context of expanding carceral nation states, significant government investments are made to erect new jails and prisons. On occasion, older sites of confinement and infliction of pain are decommissioned. Many debates ensue about the preservation of such sites. Little existing literature has examined how decommissioned jails and prisons are re-purposed through a process we refer to as “carceral retasking.” Based on a five-year qualitative study, this chapter traces new purposes assigned to these sites across Ontario, Canada. We specifically explore the role played by local historical societies in the transformation of carceral sites into heritage museums, and what these findings mean for debates about memorialization of the local.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cathy Higginson

  Education Scotland

  3 shared

• T. R. Kirk

  Queen Margaret University

  2 shared

• Daniela Jara

  Valparaiso University

  2 shared

• Mike Rayner

  University of Portsmouth

  2 shared

• Vicente Rubio Pueyo

  2 shared

• Liz Mason-Deese

  Bielefeld University

  1 shared