Dr Melissa Chacón
Postdoctoral Research Associate

Profile

Biography

Melissa joined the Department of Politics and International Relations as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in January 2025, working with Dr Harriet Gray in the AHRC-funded project Envisioning Vulnerability and Safety Otherwise: Artivist knowledge on gender-based violence in Mexico. Melissa completed her PhD in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2023, where her research examined the intersections of everyday violence and conflict-related violence in the life course of people with non-normative genders and sexualities in Colombia, drawing on feminist, queer, and decolonial approaches to violence and conflict. Melissa's broader research interests include feminist theory, queer, decolonial, and affect studies, the phenomenology of violence, displacement and migration, mental health and social justice, and participatory and arts-based methodologies.

Before joining the Department of Politics, Melissa worked as a research partner at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law and was a visiting fellow at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Melissa holds an MRes in Women's and Gender Studies (Utrecht University, Netherlands and Universidad de Granada, Spain), an MRes in Psychosocial Research, and a BA in Psychology (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia).

Research

Overview

Melissa's research looks broadly at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and violence. Her doctoral project examined intersections of everyday violence and conflict-related violence in the life course of people with non-normative genders and sexualities in Colombia. Using the life story method, the thesis developed a queer feminist narrative analysis to grasp the complexities of how violence is experienced, resisted, and transformed in the everyday of people with non-normative gender and sexualities living through conflict-affected contexts. Focusing on three narrative plots that emerged from these life stories, silence, displacement, and peace, the thesis makes a case for a reframing of non-normative gender and sexuality and violence in the Colombian context.

Working as a postdoctoral research associate in the AHRC-funded project Envisioning Vulnerability and Safety Otherwise: Artivist knowledge on gender-based violence in Mexico, Melissa is interested in the affective potentialities of art in denouncing, contesting, and transforming sexual and gender-based violence. The project uses participatory, arts-based research methods to build knowledge in collaboration with a diverse collection of artivists working against GBV, seeking both to learn more about the diversity of people's experiences of GBV and their everyday resistance strategies and to understand more about the power of ARTivism to break the mould of dominant ways of thinking about GBV. 

Publications

Selected publications

• Chacón, M. (2022). Re-conociendo las geografías emocionales del desplazamiento: diálogos a través de la imagen y la memoria, in C. Gregorio Gil (Ed). Etnografía y Feminismos. Restituyendo saberes y prácticas de investigación, Peter Lang.  
• Chacón, M. (2019). Gendered emotional consequences of internal displacement in Colombia. In K. Smets, K. Leurs, M. Georgiou, S. Witteborn & R. Gajjala (Eds), The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration. SAGE.
• Chacón, M. (2016). [Review of the book Gut Feminism, by Wilson, E]. Women's Studies International Forum, Vol.57, p. 51.

Work in progress

• Chacón, M. Queer everyday displacements in Colombia.
• Chacón, M. A feminist queer decolonial listening of dissident testimonies and experiences of violence and armed conflict in Colombia.
• Chacón, M. Intimate Peace: On Queer Everyday Disruptions of Violence.