R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)
Project Title
Intersectional Justice Denied: Warring Masculinity, Violence, and Peacemaking in Post-Accords El Salvador
Delta Delta Delta Fellowship, 2024–25
Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Email
R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in intersectional justice and violence, gender relations, and racialization in Latin America, with a focus on El Salvador. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Through her work on the gendered dynamics of grassroots peacemaking, Velásquez Estrada examines the central paradox of male gang members who simultaneously position themselves as purveyors of violence and peacemakers. Using intersectionality as an analytical lens, her work specifically traces how women relatives of male gang members engage in a complex politics of solidarity with their relatives’ peacemaking efforts and explores the layered politics of women’s demands for intersectional justice to transition Salvadoran society from conflict to peace.
Dr. Velásquez Estrada’s research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship: Gender Justice in the Era of Human Rights, and the National Science Foundation: Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Selected Publications
- Cordis, Shanya, Maya J. Berry, Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada, eds. Fugitive Anthropology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025. Forthcoming.
- Velásquez Estrada, R. Elizabeth. “Intersectional Justice Denied: Racist Warring Masculinity, Negative Peace, and Violence in Post-Peace Accords El Salvador.” American Anthropologist 124, no. 1 (March 2022): 39–52.
- Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and R. Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. “Towards a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (November 2017): 537–65.
- Velásquez Estrada, R. Elizabeth. “Grassroots Peacemaking: The Paradox of Reconciliation in El Salvador.” Social Justice 41, no. 3 (2015): 69–86.