Spotlight on: Ana Pandal De La Peza

We’re excited to launch our PhD/ECR Spotlight on… series and introduce Ana Pandal De La Peza as our first scholar in the spotlight. Ana is a PhD Candidate at Central European University, where she researches world-making practices in the organised search for forcibly disappeared people in Mexico. 

Find out more about Ana and connect via her LinkedIn, Bluesky and ORCID profile. 

(Thank you also to the Environment and Climate Politics Working Group for the inspiration for this series!)

Tell us a bit about yourself. 

I am currently a fourth year PhD candidate in International Relations at Central European University in Vienna. My PhD studies the world-making practices of La Búsqueda: the organised search for forcibly disappeared people in Mexico, led predominantly by women's collectives; through the theoretical lens of cosmopraxis, a concept coined by Amaya Querejazu to describe practices that simultaneously enact and travel between multiple ontological worlds: spiritual and material, human and more-than-human, living and dead. I argue these collectives have outperformed state institutions not despite, but because of, their plural epistemological practices, which weave forensic science, environmental attunement, collective memory, dreams, and ritual into forms of knowledge the state actively excludes. A central thread is the politics of love: the way collective, combative, durable love operates as the organisational infrastructure holding search collectives together across years of institutional failure and grief.

Beyond my PhD, in 2017 I co-founded Org Genera A.C. in Mexico with my colleague Sara Achik, to study how isolation at different stages of women's lives perpetuates gender-based violence — and to design spaces that foster connection, belonging, and solidarity among women.

Outside academia, I am drawn to the creative arts — lately embroidery and watercolours. I am an obsessive fiction reader, genuinely convinced that stories are doors to worlds that would otherwise escape us. Some of my favorite authors are Siri Hustvedt, Susan Abulhawa, Guadalupe Nettel, Marcela Serrano, and Tiffany McDaniel.

What are your research interests?

My research interests lie at the intersection of feminist and pluriversal International Relations, decolonial epistemologies, and methodological innovation. Particularly in how embodied, relational fieldwork can generate knowledge within and beyond academic frameworks. I am drawn to questions about what it means to do IR from the margins: from communities the discipline has historically rendered invisible, disposable, and ungrievable, and through epistemologies it has long excluded. This means taking seriously the knowledge embedded in grief, ritual, dreams, and love, that Feminist IR has long advocated for; and asking what IR looks like when these are treated as legitimate analytical categories. Ultimately, I am interested in how scholarship can remain in genuine, ongoing dialogue with activism and social change, rather than assuming it is ‘out there’ for us to study.

Who is your favorite feminist icon?  

My favorite feminist icon is, undoubtedly, my mom María Guadalupe. Her eyes were my first lenses for understanding the world. She recognised early, and within a time and social context that made it far from easy, that her life belonged to her, and that her happiness was hers to pursue. And yet she held this alongside a deep awareness of how profoundly she was shaped by the relationships she cultivated, through love, with those of us lucky enough to surround her. She was also an innate creator, with hands capable of making entire worlds through crochet, painting, Talavera, and so much more; all generously left for us around her. She left the world of the living as we know it in January 2026, but she remains, and always will, in everyone she transformed. Her legacy remains an inspiration, and I will forever hold my life and my work as a testimony to hers. I cherish Feminist IR for being the space where my love for my mom, and my grief for her loss, both hold political and academic relevance.

What are three sources you would recommend to others interested in feminist IR generally or your research topic in particular? 

I would first recommend reading fiction with the seriousness we tend to reserve only for academic writing. If our scholarship is about worlds, and negotiating difference within them, then literature may be the most honest guide to how different worlds feel from the inside. Beyond this, I would point to Maria Lugones's writings on feminist solidarities and world-travelling; Amaya Querejazu's work on cosmopolitics and pluriversal ontologies; and Donna Haraway's writing on situated knowledges and standpoint epistemology. These three thinkers have profoundly shaped how I understand knowledge, relation, and the politics of location. Together, I believe they offer an intellectual compass for anyone trying to do IR differently.

What’s next for you? 

I am looking forward to continuing to explore relational and pluriversal approaches 'from the ground'. Perspectives that can expand what International Relations is, making it more adequate to address the infinitely complex and increasingly violent worlds we inhabit. I am also excited to teach my new BA course, Imagining New Worlds: Decolonial, Feminist, and Relational Perspectives for Worldmaking, next fall. I believe deeply that the classroom is a breeding ground for social change, and teaching is among the practices I find most meaningful. I am currently looking for postdoctoral and teaching opportunities that allow me to keep doing exactly this: working at the intersection of theory and practice, scholarship, and activism, from academic spaces that welcome that kind of boundary-crossing.