Adelaida researches Colombian women’s resistance to state violence, with a focus on how women use art forms like murals, performance and embroidery to resist dominant narratives of the Colombian civil war. Her research takes place with artists and activists in her family's hometown of Bogotá, Colombia. She most recently conducted research with Madres de Falsos Positivos Colombia, a group of mothers of victims of extrajudicial killings dubbed 'false positives', and mothers of victims of police shootings. Her research considers how mothers wield their grief into lucha, or battle, to demand justice for their missing relatives. Further, she considers how activist mothers use public art, including murals, performance art to amplify their public expression of grief as a form of political activism against a state that would prefer to silence their mourning.

This grant will allow Adelaida to continue to combine her research pursuits with a struggle for justice. Before grad school, she worked in Latinx communication at Planned Parenthood, at several women's rights nonprofits in New York, and with an art collective in Bogotá. She aims to contribute an activist lens to academia, and an international academic lens and visibility useful to Colombian women's movements. The products will include collaborative media and artwork, op-eds in Colombian papers, and finally a dissertation, articles, and a book which pushes forward models of collaborative, multimodal scholarship.