Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black-mestiza, Mexican-British, woman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge.
Her research focusses on the intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact; feminist theory, intersectionality and racism. She is an expert in qualitative research methods, visual methodologies and thrives in interdisciplinary collaborations. She is now learning all about design thinking for social transformation.
Mónica is currently leading the development of the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST), established with seed funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Through a series of “experiments”, she and the team are shaping the Institute’s vision and methodology, foregrounding curiosity, collaboration and transformation to generate innovative approaches to studying global racisms and translating research into action-oriented dialogues and practices.
Mónica was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career fellowship 2022-23 for the project: “The Structure Within: Internalised Oppression, Defensiveness and Resentment”. Outputs include this bilingual website with an animation film, podcasts, resources and a growing community of practice and a campaign in FB and Instagram .
Her other research projects are: a project on blackness, representation and women’s economic trajectories in the Costa Chica in Mexico; a British Academy funded project on Institutional Racism in Oaxaca, Mexico; and a recently-completed large ESRC-funded research project, which she directed (together with Prof Peter Wade), Latin American Anti-racism in a Post-Racial Age, LAPORA, on antiracist practices and discourses in Latin America, comparing experiences in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico.
A book edited with Peter Wade, Against racism: organizing for social change in Latin America (Pittsburgh University Press) was published in March 2022, Portuguese and Spanish translations have been published in 2023.
Mónica is an award-winning teacher. She has lectured at Newcastle, Princeton and Nottingham Universities, Goldsmiths and Birkbeck College, and El Colegio de Mexico.
She has been Chair of the Ethnicity, Race and Indigenous People’s section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA 2014-16) and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Ethnic and Racial Studies and Journal of Latin American Studies.
A very exciting project is her participation as a founder member of Malunga: Network of Global Justice and Against Anti-Black Racism (FB page / Instagram).
At Cambridge, Mónica co-led the Decolonise Sociology Working Group and with Dr Ella McPherson she runs the End Everyday Racism project, a web-based platform to report and monitor racism in higher education. From 2017-2021 she was the University of Cambridge Race Equality Co-Champion. From 2019-2022 Mónica was a member of the University of Cambridge Legacies of Enslavement Advisory Board, which launched in Sept 2022 the Legacies of Enslavement Enquiry.
Since 2010, alongside Emiko Saldívar and Judith Bautista, Mónica has co-led the Collective for the Elimination of Racism in Mexico (COPERA), dedicated to making racism public. Over more than a decade, COPERA has brought together academics and activists to expose racism in its multiple forms and to link scholarship with social action. At the core of its work is the methodology of collective racial healing, developed as a way to acknowledge and transform the emotional and structural impacts of racism while fostering sustained conversations, public campaigns and policy interventions in Mexico.
