Silvana Tapia Tapia

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia

Small Group Project 2026

Brick-by-Brick, Wall-by-Wall: Co-Producing Transnational Feminist Abolitionist Knowledges

With molly ackhurst & Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Since the 2010s, global uprisings against authoritarianism, corruption, and coercive overreach (e.g., the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, End SARS) have brought discussions on prison and police abolition into mainstream social justice agendas. These debates are crucial to address militarisation, carceral violence, and totalitarianism worldwide, and include feminist perspectives on abolition and anti-carceral justice across the global North and South. However, limited resources to cross geographical and language barriers have hindered the formation of transnational networks. Making abolitionist approaches to justice understandable and imaginable to the public is also a key collective challenge. Additionally, collaboration among academics, activists and grassroots organisers is infrequent and largely confined to the global North. Therefore, establishing a South-North forum for knowledge exchange is vital.

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Areas of interest

Legal Sociology Human Rights Penal Justice Violence Latin America Prisons Gender Incarceration Feminism Decolonisation Ecuador South America

Cohort

FG11

Biography

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.

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.

Biographical details correct as of 26.06.25