Biography

Carolina Arango-Vargas is a feminist anthropologist, educator & researcher (PhD, Syracuse University, 2018). Her research focuses on the organizational and personal trajectories of organizations of the Colombian Women’s Movement. In particular, she works with popular-sector rural and urban women, mujeres populares, who craft their own feminist thinking and use it as a political tool to resist political violence, poverty, and multiple forms of discrimination and epistemic erasure. Carolina's research interests include the development of women's agency and political consciousness, the impact of political violence on women's subjectivity, memory, and healing in her native Colombia and in other contexts of war. Carolina uses ethnographic methodologies and draws upon transnational and decolonial feminist theories, working at the intersection of political and feminist anthropology. She works in university-community collaborations in San Antonio, TX, alongside Chicanx/ Latinx and Black feminist activists and scholars to strengthen anti-racist pedagogies and grassroots efforts through decolonial frameworks. More broadly, she is interested in the significance of feminismo popular in Latin America and aims to contribute to Latin American feminist archives of resistance from which Global North feminists can learn and draw strength. As a Latin American working in US academia, Carolina is invested in understanding epistemic displacement, decolonizing academia, and building solidarity-based coalitions. She is the author of “Perched on a Parched Hill; Popular women, Popular Feminism, and the Struggle for Water in Medellin” (2021) published in Latin American Perspectives, and “No poder nombrar la violencia: posicionalidad y emociones en el campo y en la escritura etnográfica” that appeared on the book “Emociones de Ida y Vuelta”, UNAM, Eds. Herrera & Martinez (2022). She is currently working on her book project “Political agency, Violence and Subjectivity among Popular women and Feminist Organizations in Antioquia, Colombia.