Fellow 2026-2027  Alejandra Bello

Alejandra Bello-Urrego is a political theorist and interdisciplinary scholar whose work examines how power is inscribed on bodies, territories, and forms of life. Until last year, she served as an associate professor at a public university in Colombia. Her research sits at the intersection of feminist, queer, and decolonial thought from the Global South, and focuses on the entanglements between gender, violence, spatiality, and political subjectivity.

A central axis of her work is the concept of the body-territory, developed in Indigenous, Black, and community feminisms in Latin America. Through this lens, she analyzes how cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist, and colonial regimes of power operate not only through institutions and discourse, but through the marking, regulation, and dispossession of corporealities. The body appears as the first political territory: a site where histories of extraction, racialization, and gendered domination converge, and from which struggles over life and dignity emerge. Her research has also advanced cruelty as a key analytical category for understanding contemporary forms of violence. Rather than treating violence as an exceptional rupture, she approaches cruelty as a patterned and pedagogical force that shapes sensibilities, normalizes disposability, and reorganizes social relations. This perspective has guided her analyses of armed conflict, anti-LGBTIQ+ violence, forced displacement, and the reconfiguration of sovereignty in Colombia and Latin America under neoliberal and authoritarian turns.  

Building on this work, her current research develops tenderness as a feminist political category. She explores how tenderness, often confined to the private or feminized sphere, can be understood as a critical counterforce to cruelty and a necessary condition for collective survival. Tenderness names practices of care, attention, and relational responsibility that sustain life and dignity in contexts structured by abandonment and systemic violence. By theorizing cruelty and tenderness together, she seeks to expand dominant understandings of political subjectivity beyond heroic or purely antagonistic models.  

Alejandra Bello-Urrego holds two PhDs: one in Bioethics from the Universidade de Brasília and one in Gender Studies (Political Science) from the University of Paris VIII. She also holds master’s degrees in Law and in Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, as well as a background in political science. Her trajectory includes postdoctoral research in feminist theory at the University of Lausanne and in feminist and cultural studies at Universidad de los Andes. Her work has been published in leading journals in Latin America and Europe. She works across Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English, and is committed to building transdisciplinary and transregional conversations that decenter Eurocentric narratives and foreground knowledge produced in the Global South.