Ph.D Candidate, Educator, Reseacher
Her research interests bridge the Legal Humanities, Critical Race Theory, Racial Form, and Third World Women Feminisms.
Within this interdisciplinary framework, her dissertation posits the figure of the international student as a repository for the United States’ aspirations for global influence and its anxieties about external threats upon which hinges a relationship between border enforcement and university bureaucracy. She writes about how the figure of the international student allows academic institutions to engage in national border-making and perpetuate exploitative relationships with the Global South while profiting from international diversity.
Before attending UCSB, she received her undergraduate degree in Literature at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and an M.A in English from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Before joining UCSB she was an English instructor at Howard University.
MariaCarolina was the 2020-21 Graduate Student Fellow at UCSB’s American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center 2021-22 Public Humanities Fellow, and 2021-22 Graduate Research Assistant for Las Maestras Center.
She is part of the Editorial Team of the Research + Activism Bibliography, a digital bibliography of scholarship that involves social justice activism or discusses what engaged scholarship means.
As a Public Humanities Fellow from UC Santa Barbara’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and in collaboration with SillónEstudios, she designed, produced and hosted SietePolas: El Podcast, a podcast that documents the lives, joys, and struggles of feminists in their day to day lives, their work, and their activism.
Public Writer & Digital Activist
Known online and through her activism as SinturaConEse, her public-facing work includes a newsletter, blog writing, content creation for digital activism, and podcasting.
She writes a bi-weekly newsletter in Spanish where she escapes from the constraints of academic writing, returns to the comfort of writing in her mother tongue, and experiences the joy of creative critical writing.
She co-founded the Colombian feminist platform SietePolas where, for six years, she wrote a blog and produced content for Instagram and Twitter. This platform, a pioneer in digital feminist activism in Colombia, disseminated feminist analyses and debates to its audience of more than 50,000 followers. SinturaConEse and her fellow writers at this collective also offered their expertise in critical gender analyses to multiple print and digital publications in Colombia. They also became actively involved in legal and political activism for reproductive rights, particularly as part of the Causa Justa movement, which achieved the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia in 2022.