Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia

Birmingham Law School
Associate Professor in Law

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is an Associate Professor at Birmingham Law School. Her socio-legal research is situated at the convergence of human rights, the penal system and gender-based violence. Her pedagogical and research activities are shaped by her collaborative work with activists, organisers and practitioners in Latin America.

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Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy in Socio-Legal Studies (University of Kent, UK)
  • Master in Criminal Law (LLM) (Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador)
  • Lawyer of the Republic’s Tribunals (LLB) (Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador)

Biography

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is Associate Professor at Birmingham Law School and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2022-2024). Her socio-legal research explores the violence of the penal system and the role of international human rights in propagating criminal law-centric justice models. She also examines how the penitentiary system affects women who provide care and support to incarcerated people.

Silvana is the author of the monograph “Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform. Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador” (Routledge, 2022), which was awarded the Hart-Socio-Legal Studies Association book prize in 2023. She earned her doctorate in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Kent in 2017 and previously served as Assistant Professor and Research Coordinator at Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador (2017-2022).

An active member of the Alliance Against Prisons in Ecuador, Silvana has been consulted by the UN and served as an expert witness in civil society tribunals addressing prison massacres. She frequently provides expert testimony in U.S. asylum cases for Ecuadorian domestic violence survivors and collaborates with grassroots organisations on issues like the decriminalisation of abortion and countering carceral violence. In 2020, Silvana was editor of the Shadow Report for the CEDAW Committee, prepared by the National Coalition of Women (Ecuador). 

Silvana is alumna of the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy and the Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. Her research is published in leading journals, including Feminist Theory, Social and Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, Law and Critique and Latin American Law Review.

Teaching

 

  • Gender and Law
  • Decolonising Legal Concepts
  • Human Rights and Criminal Justice

Postgraduate supervision

Silvana is happy to supervise sprojects that aim to develop:
Anticolonial and/or feminist critiques of prisons and the criminal legal system.
Anticolonial and/or feminist critiques of mainstream human rights law and advocacy.
New knowledge on the links between penal violence and social reproduction.
New knowledge on feminist and anti-carceral social movements.

Research

Silvana's research exposes the limitations of mainstream human rights discourse, and the perils of relying primarily on criminal law, to counteract violence against women. Her research is participatory, community-based and informed by the experiences of survivors, organisers, activists and practitioners, especially from the Global South. 

Silvana's current work explores how anticarceral and feminist collectives in Ecuador and the UK respond to human rights frameworks that prescribe a punitive response to VAW. She is also developing a project on how carceral violence affects women 'outside and around' prisons, that is, women who are not incarcerated but have connections to prisons, such as those supporting incarcerated relatives and friends.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Tapia, ST 2022, Feminism, Violence Against Women, and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador. Social Justice, 1st edn, Routledge, London. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003098799

Tapia Tapia, S, Fajardo Monroy, G, Padrón Palacios, T, Valverde-Chérrez, D & Álvarez-Ledesma, D 2022, Impacto de la pandemia de COVID-19 en las vidas y derechos de las académicas y científicas ecuatorianas. Universidad del Azuay, Cuenca. https://doi.org/10.33324/ceuazuay.225.193

Article

Tapia Tapia, S, Espinoza Álvarez, M & Tapia Tapia, G 2024, 'Juridificación y penalidad: límites del discurso internacional de los derechos humanos en materia de violencia contra las mujeres', Estudios Socio-Jurídicos, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1-38. <https://revistas.urosario.edu.co/index.php/sociojuridicos/article/view/13487>

Tapia Tapia, S 2023, 'Human Rights Penality and Violence Against Women: The Coloniality of Disembodied Justice', Law and Critique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09355-4

Tapia-Tapia, S, Fajardo-Monroy, G & Padrón-Palacios, T 2023, 'Reproducción social, género y academia durante la pandemia de Covid-19: Experiencias desde Ecuador', Sociedad y Economía, no. 48, e10411972. https://doi.org/10.25100/sye.v0i48.11972

Hidalgo, SL & Tapia, ST 2022, 'Colonialidades legales: la constitucionalizacion de la justicia indigena y la continuidad del discurso judicial hegemonico en Ecuador', Revista Derecho del Estado, no. 52, pp. 299-331. https://doi.org/10.18601/01229893.n52.10

Tapia, ST 2021, 'Beyond carceral expansion: survivors’ experiences of using specialised courts for violence against women in Ecuador', Social & Legal Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 848–868. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663920973747

Tapia Tapia, S & Bedford, K 2021, 'Specialised (in)security: violence against women, criminal courts, and the gendered presence of the state in Ecuador', Latin American Law Review, vol. 2021, no. 7, pp. 21-42. https://doi.org/10.29263/lar07.2021.02

Tapia-Tapia, SC 2019, 'Continuidades coloniales: del discurso de la protección a la familia a la regulación de la violencia contra las mujeres en el derecho ecuatoriano del siglo XX', UNIVERSIDAD VERDAD. https://doi.org/10.33324/uv.v1i75.210

Tapia, ST 2018, 'Feminism and Penal Expansion: The Role of Rights-Based Criminal Law in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador', Feminist Legal Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-018-9380-5

Tapia Tapia, S 2016, 'Sumak Kawsay, coloniality and the criminalisation of violence against women in Ecuador', Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700116645324

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Tapia Tapia, S 2023, Human Rights Penality, the Inter-American Approach to Violence Against Women, and the Local Effects of Centering Criminal Justice. in L Goodmark, H Douglas, K Fitz-Gibbon & S Walklate (eds), The Criminalization of Violence Against Women: Comparative Perspectives. 1 edn, Oxford University Press, pp. 231-248. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197651841.003.0013

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Expertise

Prison violence, violence against women, Ecuador, Latin America, anti-carceral social movements.

Expertise

Violence against women, human rights, criminal law, Ecuador, prisons, Latin America