Dr. Alexander Araya López

Dr. Alexander Araya López is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow for the PROTEST-AIRT project. He obtained his Ph.D at the Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin in 2014. His doctoral thesis focused on media discourses about graffiti practices in Brazil and Costa Rica. In 2018, Dr Araya López was awarded his first Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship for the project RIGHTS UP, which was hosted at Ca' Foscari, University of Venice. The RIGHTS UP project explored the emergence of social movements critical of mass tourism in three European cities, namely Venice, Amsterdam and Barcelona. Dr Araya López has also worked as an invited postdoctoral researcher at La Sorbonne Paris 3, Institut des Hautes Etudes de l'Amérique Latine (IHEAL), where he studied the media discourses about the opposition against Daniel Ortega's government in Nicaragua. He concluded both his Bachelor and Licentiate degrees at the Universidad de Costa Rica, where he taught Sociology of Media and Communication.

He has extensive expertise on social movements, urban dissent and cross-comparative analysis both within Europe and in Latin America. His research interests include contemporary discussions on protest, radical politics, civil/democratic disobedience and media representations of acts of dissent.