Sánchez Parra, Tatiana
Specialties
Reproductive violence and justice, war and transitional justice, feminist peacebuilding, social reproduction, creative and arts-based approaches. Colombia, Latin America
Office
Tatiana Sánchez Parra
Assistant Professor | Cultural Anthropology
I am a feminist ethnographer researching people’s experiences of reproductive violence and justice in contexts of war and transitional justice. I am interested in thinking about these issues through feminist peacebuilding, social reproduction, and reproductive justice frameworks. In my work, I explore creative and arts-based approaches not only as tools for data collection, but as collaborative sites of knowledge production. I have engaged with various transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia, working to make different forms of reproductive violence legible. Before joining the University of Tennessee, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where I continue to be a visiting researcher.
My first book, Born of War in Colombia: Reproductive Violence and Memories of Absence (Rutgers University Press, 2024), follows whispers about children born of conflict-related sexual violence in Colombia. It addresses why, despite their many forms of visibility, they remain unseen by human rights and transitional justice actors. The book draws on ethnography with an Afro-Colombian community that endured a four-year paramilitary confinement and of the country’s transitional justice system. It reveals how a harm-centred model of transitional justice has converged with a restricted notion of gendered victimhood, rendering the bodies of people born of conflict-related sexual violence unintelligible to policymakers and scholars. While broadening notions of gendered victimhood, the book also offers nuanced analyses about the bureaucracies of reparations and registry, issues of silence, concealment and unintelligibility, the labour of memory, and social reproduction in militarized contexts of environmental devastation.
“In this detailed, carefully crafted ethnography, Sanchez Parra offers insights into the possibilities of transformative justice for children born of conflict-related sexual violence, as well as for their mothers who were forced to assume reproductive labor in the aftermath of rape. It lays out an understanding of past violence and its reproductive legacies, while also enumerating steps toward transformative justice measures for these children and their mothers. Sanchez Parra demonstrates the ways in which gendered expectations of care contribute to hegemonic maternal scripts that too frequently blame women for the sexual and reproductive violence they have survived.”
~Kimberly Theidon, MPH, PhD, Henry J. Leir professor in international humanitarian studies at Tufts University
“Tatiana Sanchez Parra untangles the layers of power that render persons born of war in Colombia as simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible at a moment of history that witnesses an unprecedented level of recognition of their victim status. Engaging in an ethnography of whispers, silences, and the unspoken, the author transcends the limitations and concealments of transitional justice in Colombia, directing the reader towards a more transformative approach, and advances research, policy, and theories of what it means to be exiled to the interstices of victim and perpetrator.”
~Erin Baines, associate professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, the University of British Columbia
Selected publications
Book
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2024) Born of War in Colombia: Reproductive Violence and Memories of Absence. Rutgers University Press.
Journal articles and chapters:
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2023). The Colombian Truth Commission’s work on reproductive violence: gendered victimhood and reproductive autonomy. Feminist Review, 135(1), 28-44.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2023). Contested Identities: Gender, Reproduction, and War in Colombia, in: Mazurana, Dyan and Kimberly Theidon (Eds). Challenging Conceptions: Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation. Oxford University Press.
- Samson, Colin and Tatiana Sanchez Parra (2023). ‘Claiming Spaces for Justice: Art, Resistance and Finding One Another in Bogotá’, Third Text, 7th September 2023.
- Sandoval, Clara; Tatiana Sanchez Parra; Juliana Laguna and Tatiana Olarte (2022). Study on the situation and opportunities of the right to reparation for victims and survivors of conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence in Colombia. Victims at the centre of reparation. Global Survivors Fund. Geneva.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2022). Construcción de paz feminista: Comunes para desordenar y tejer, in: Sañudo, María Fernanda (Ed). Tramas y conversaciones: Heterogeneidad de las miradas sobre la producción de lo común. Bogota: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2020). What’s killing them: Violence beyond COVID-19 in Colombia. Crime, Media and Culture, COVID-19 Symposium, 17(1), 11-16.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana and Teresa Fernandez Paredes (2020). ‘From reproductive labor to reproductive violence: Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace and its window of opportunity’, PoLAR Online, Emergent Conversations 10, Bureaucracy, Justice, and the State in a Post-Accord Colombia, 24th November 2020.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana and Sergio Lo Iacono (2020). (Re) Productive Discourses: Media Coverage of Children Born of War in Colombia. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 39(1), 22-36.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2020). Una aproximación metodológica al silencio como sitio de sentido: Conversación sobre producción de conocimiento y principios éticos, in: López, Carlos (Ed.). Investigar a la interperie: Reflexiones sobre métodos en las ciencias sociales desde el oficio. Bogota: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
- McClanahan, Bill, Tatiana Sanchez Parra and Avi Brisman (2019). Conflict, Environment and Transition: Colombia, Ecology and Tourism after Demobilization. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 8(3), 74-88.
- Sanchez Parra, Tatiana (2018). The Hollow Shell: Children Born of War and the Realities of the Armed Conflict in Colombia, International Journal of Transitional Justice,12(1):45-63.
Guest editor Special Issues:
- ‘Addressing Gender-Based Violence in Latin America: Resistance, Agency and Solidarity’, in Third World Quarterly, Co-edited with Sanne Weber. March 2024.
- ‘Colombia at the Crossroads: War, Resistance, Transformation, and Peacebuilding’, in Bulletin of Latin American Research, Co-edited with Andrei Gomez-Suarez. June 2019
Teaching
Anthropology of Human Rights
Anthropology of Reproduction and Sexuality
Education
Ph.D. in Sociology, University of Essex, UK (2018)
M.A. in Theory and Practice of Human Rights, University of Essex, UK (2013)
M.A. in Social Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia (2007)
B.A. in Social Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia (2006)