Irina Popescu

Explores how the radical work of women performance artists and collectives in Mexico challenge and transform the injustices that shape everyday life. Looks at the work and career of Lorena Wolffer, a Mexico-city based feminist performance artist who, for over twenty years, created interventions in order to intersect political activism with performance.

Explores the recent history of the Ni una menos movement in Argentina as well as investigates two specific methods of activism employed by the feminist collective. Emphasizes that the collective, in seeking to cast feminicide as a human rights abuse, actively positions it as a public crime through the employment of escraches (public shaming of public officials) and memorialisation.

Investigates how empathy can be incrementally learned through a melodramatic storytelling practice and, eventually, mobilized to effect political and social change.

Investigates how Toni Morrison's Beloved turned to the iron bit as a physical torture device both silencing and restructuring the mouth into a smile and as a figurative, metaphorical device employed inside the novel to explore how the process of telling and the instrument of telling (the mouth) gain the power to un-silence the past.

Investigates Octavia Butler's speculative novel, Kindred (1979) through the lens of human rights, empathy, and the relationship between the body, pain, and the reader.