Yennifer Paola Villa Rojas, predoctoral researcher from Universidad Pedagógica Nacional (UPN, Colombia) is doing a research stay with us

PhD Candidate in Education, holding a Master’s Degree in Education and a bachelor’s degree in Education with an emphasis on Special Education, Normal-school teacher focused on Mathematics. Feminist and Syndicalist.

Lecturer in Community Education focusing on Human Rights in the Faculty of Education at the National Pedagogic University, where she is a member of the Research Group on Polyphony in Community and Popular Education and of the CLACSO Work Group on Critical Studies in Disability. She is studying for the Interinstitutional Doctorate in Education in Bogotá, Colombia.

She has a pedagogical trajectory in Formal Education and Labour and Human Development involving students of diferent ages and conditions, young students with disabilities, teachers and managers. She also has been working with National Catholic Confederation of Education (CONACED), Research Groups recognised by COLCIENCIAS, Flexible Education Models (MEF) and many different Social, Feminist and Community Literacy Organizations.

The professor who will guide the research stay is Dr. Asun Pié Balague, tenured professor of the Department of Studies of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the Open University of Catalonia.

As a lecturer at Colombia’s National Pedagogic University (UPN), a feminist and a student following the Interinstitutional Doctorate in Education course, I am preparing a doctoral thesis focusing on the life of Rose Ammarantha Wass Suárez and her trans-chueca (trans-crip) experiences. This subject relates to the political and pedagogical positions that support research and includes the intersection between disability and gender, specifically where visual impairment and the trans experience come together. This intercorporeal emergency is thus located at the border, i.e. the spatial metaphor that reflects the sense of intersectionality is strained, as it is not occupied by the points of interconnection that might be expected but by something that remains distant. Its grey, indeterminate nature means that signs of oppression can be found in it which are common at times but may also indicate distancing, highlighting the shared roots of gender violence and ableist violence and leading us to understand how some lives become marginalised, stripped of humanity, and pressured to succumb to normalisation as a patriarchal, capitalist strategy that imposes its control over bodies, desire and sexuality.

Image of the wall depicting Ammarantha Wass Suárez, a Colombian trans-crip activist.