Mónica Moreno Figueroa is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. She was born and raised in Mexico. She studied a BA in Media and Communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana in León and Mexico City, and then worked at the Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud, Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexican Youth Institute, Ministry of Education), first as Head of the Addictions Prevention Department and then as Coordinator of the National Youth Gender Programme.
In 1999, she came to the UK to study for an MA in Gender, Culture and Modernity and a PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, London and graduated in 2006. After several temporary teaching positions (at Goldsmiths and Birkbeck), she became a temporary Lecturer in Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham (2006-2007), and then a permanent lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle (2007-2014). In 2012, she was Visiting Research Scholar at the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. She has also lectured at El Colegio de México. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University in 2014 before coming to the University of Cambridge later that year.
An integral part of her academic work has been her commitment to explore different forms of engaged and engaging sociology with a deep concern for social justice. This has taken her to develop links and projects that aim to make racism public as a strategy for its elimination. In the summer of 2011, she co-founded the Collective COPERA (Colectivo para Eliminar el Racismo en Mexico) alongside Dr Emiko Saldivar (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Dr Alicia Castellanos (UAM-Iztapalapa) and now has grown to include a wider group of academics and activists. The collective has been developing a series of initiatives to make racism public in Mexico, visibilise racism in its multiple forms in the country, link academia and activism and incorporate a 'race' perspective in public policy and human rights activism.
