Ana Del Conde

Ana Del Conde is a postdoctoral fellow for the Program for the Study of Women and Gender and the Jandon Center for Community Engagement. She is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in feminist theory and engaged ethnographic research. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political anthropology and feminist studies and focus on (in)security, conflict, justice, and collective action.

Del Conde is currently working on a book project that is based on over 20-month ethnographic research she conducted in Michoacán, Mexico. Her work focuses on how P’urhépecha women navigate the dynamics of violence experienced in their region—an area that has been impacted by the presence of organized crime, the expansion of agro-business, and the implementation of diverse security policies. She is using this work to look into how securitization strategies and the implementation of policies impact the bodies of those who are constantly “othered” by the state because of their gender and ethnicity. By bringing a gendered perspective to how communities develop communal projects of security and self-governance, her work sheds light on novel security strategies led by women through processes of collectivity and solidarity that oftentimes are invisibilized or ignored.

As a public scholar, Del Conde has collaborated with grassroots organizations in Mexico.  She developed communal and popular education projects among colectivas with a focus on human rights and justice. Furthermore, she helped create a network of psychosocial accompaniment to confront gender-based violence in the P’urhépecha region of Michoacán. Additionally, she has served as a consultant on national and international research projects that focus on gender-based violence and insecurity across Mexico and Latin America.

Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, CONACYT (Mexico) and the University of Massachusetts.

Selected Publications

Working Papers

Fugitive interruptions: abortion networks in Michoacán

Embodied Alliances: Alternative Affective Autonomies through Acompañamiento

Justicia para nosotras: Building an anthropological understanding of security and justice

Book Chapters

2019 “Legal and Illegal Violence in Mexico: Organized Crime, Politics and Mining in Michoacán,” in Organized Crime and the Expansion of Capital, edited by Dawn Paley and Simon Granovsky-Larsen, Regina, Canada: University of Regina Press. (co-authored with Heriberto Paredes)

2015 “Dinámicas de subjetivación política en la meseta p’urhépecha: La lucha autonómica de Cherán,” in Movimientos Subalternos, Antagonistas y Autónomos en México y América Latina, edited by Massimo Modonesi, Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO.