Lorena Cuya Gavilano

My research dives into the aesthetics and epistemes of migration—how art, literature, and film don’t just tell migration stories, but shape the very way we think about them. I explore how Andean narratives imagine the migrant, and how these cultural works push back against colonial ways of knowing. This is what scholar Walter Mignolo calls “epistemic disobedience”—the refusal to simply fit “the other” into Western frameworks, and instead embracing multiple, non-Eurocentric ways of understanding the world. In other words, it’s about listening to the many voices that global history has tried to silence—and discovering how they rewrite the map of knowledge itself.

Current Research

My current work brings together seemingly distant worlds: Post-Cold War Andean narratives, the cultural imagination of the Anthropocene, and the rise of Andean-Pop, Andean Futurism, and speculative fictions. Yet all converge in the same historical moment, shaped by overlapping displacements—not only the movement of people across borders, but also translations into virtual spaces and speculative worlds. From the ecological visions of Anthropocene science fiction to the unapologetic flair of cholo-pop and neoindigenist aesthetics and the immediacy of social media interventions, these projects map an Andes in transformation—politically, culturally, and imaginatively.

Andean Studies

Andean Migration and transnationalism, Epistemologies of Migration, Affects and Migration

Asian Diasporas in the Andes, Chinesse and African Encounters in the Andes

Andean Visual Arts

Latin American Cultural Studies

Film Studies

Languages for Specific Purposes Pedagogy, Spanish for Specific Purposes