Lucila Rozas

Lucila Rozas’ research focuses on the socio-technical practices and discourses of feminist activist collectives in social media platforms. She is interested in digital activism, feminisms, sexual and gender diversity, gender justice, post-colonial digital studies, and qualitative digital methods.

Rozas is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication. She is originally from Cusco, Peru. She received her Licenciatura (5-year undergraduate degree) in Political Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and her M.Sc. in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam. During her masters, she also studied at the University of Deusto (Spain) and University College Dublin (Ireland) fully funded by an Erasmus Mundus scholarship. She has developed interdisciplinary research in a wide variety of topics, from the strategies of LGBT+ activists to push for the approval of sexual orientation and gender identity policies to the representations of mental health in Peruvian print media. 

At the beginning of her career, Rozas developed academic work mostly focused on the fields of sociology and political science. Her M.Sc. thesis on gender and return migration is published in a book compilation called Género en el Perú: Nuevos enfoques, miradas interdisciplinarias (Universidad de Lima and Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social — CIES). She also co-wrote and published a book on the experiences of street-level bureaucrats and the users of cash-transfer social programs called Acá no hay ventanillas: la burocracia de la calle en los programas sociales (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos). 

In the last few years, her academic interests shifted to communication. She taught research methods and social analysis at the undergrad level in the Faculty of Communications of Universidad de Lima, Peru. Being affiliated with the Health Communications Research Group of the same university, she also gained experience in research management, having conducted and coordinated a policy-oriented research project on the effects of food marketing on children’s health, which took place in four Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru). She is also a big open data enthusiast and has received training on FAIR data management and data curation funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) — Canada. 

Her most recent academic work focuses on social media and the role it has in identity construction, discourse, activism, and social change. In 2021, she has conducted and co-written two research projects. The first is an independent project about the construction of affect and LGB subjectivities through the qualitative exploration of the coming-out narratives of queer Latinx YouTube celebrity vloggers. The second project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Consortium (Consorcio de Investigación Económica y Social — CIES) explores the discourse and social media responses to two social awareness digital campaigns about discrimination and violence. This project aims to impact the communication strategies of State agencies and non-profit organizations in Peru, as well as to initiate a conversation about hate speech online. 

At Annenberg, Rozas hopes to continue in that line of research by exploring, from a qualitative perspective, the socio-technical practices and discourses of Latinx feminist activists on social media platforms.