Ana Paola Gutierrez Garza

My research focuses on Latin American migration, gender and social inequality in the UK, Spain and The United States. How do my concerns in these three research sites connect? A common thread runs through them: of understanding political and ethical responses to structural inequality, and showing how various social, gendered, ethical and cultural practices inform those responses which often facilitate methods and strategies of coping and persevering.

My doctoral work (2014-2018) was based on twenty months fieldwork research in London with Latin American women migrants working in sex and domestic work. My research analyses the problems and opportunities caused by migration and instead of concentrating only on the economic and political aspects of migration and labor, it focuses on the creation and (re)creation of migrants’ subjectivities experiencing multiple dislocations within precarious realities. 

My postdoctoral work at the LSE (2015-2018) allowed me to broaden the field of my research, still with a strong focus on care, inequality and migration. During 2016, I spent ten months doing fieldwork with an anti-eviction social movement called PAH (Platform for people affected by mortgages) analyzing the role of advice as a form of collective care and social struggle against current austerity policies and the transformation of the welfare state in Spain. 

Over the last four years, I have been involved in a postdoctoral research project concerned with inequality and cooperation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have conducted short stints of fieldwork in 2014 and 2015. Economic and social adversity for the Hispanic community in Tulsa. The research has centered on the analysis of childrearing arrangements and the development of networks of care and cooperation among migrant women against the backdrop of a restrictive racial and legal system. 

My various field sites offer a comparative approach to the study of migration and people’s (particularly women) efforts and abilities to create possibilities for themselves in the face of precarious realities. My lens on care and ethics has illuminated everyday day practices of resistance but also structural conditions of inequality. 

Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Higher Education, Associate Level) London School of Economics