Astrid V. Pérez Piñán

Astrid is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Studies. 

Her current work explores the changing development cooperation landscape, including new forms of development cooperation that address global gender inequality.  She is interested in the ‘measurement turn’ in global development and the processes leading to the creation of feminist alternatives to neoliberal economic development emerging from communities in the Global South, not limited to but including indigenous communities.

Astrid’s PhD thesis (2015, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland), titled ‘Engendering effectiveness: a feminist critique of the new aid architecture,’ developed an analysis of the current approach to measuring aid effectiveness exposing its gender blindness and technocratic focus.  She argued for an intersectional, context specific, long term, transformative approach to assess the effectiveness of foreign aid, and developed recommendations for those involved in the creation of indicators of aid effectiveness.

While at UVic, Astrid completed a short-term Post-Doctoral fellowship with the department of Gender Studies under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Parisi.  In addition, she has been working as a collaborator on a SSHRC Partnership Development interdisciplinary project: ‘The Search for Sustainable Development in the Toquaht Nation’, which responds to Toquaht Nation’s government call for the development of a decision support system to assess the socio-cultural impact of economic development projects.  The project is led by Dr. Matt Murphy in the Gustavson School of Business. 

Astrid’s research interests are: Feminist Political Economy, Gender and International Development, Gender Equality Measurement, Transnational and Indigenous Feminisms, Economic Development and Wellbeing, Community Development, Decolonization, and the Global South.