Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia

• Doctor of Philosophy in Socio-Legal Studies (University of Kent, UK)
• Master in Criminal Law (LLM) (Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador)
• Lawyer of the Republic’s Tribunals (LLB) (Universidad del Azuay, Ecuador)

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is Associate Professor at Birmingham Law School and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2022-2024). 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.

• Gender and Law
• Decolonising Legal Concepts
• Human Rights and Criminal Justice

Silvana is happy to supervise projects at the intersections between Criminal Law, Gender, and Human Rights. In particular, projects that aim to develop:

Anticolonial and/or feminist critiques of prisons and the criminal legal system.
Anticolonial and/or feminist critiques of mainstream human rights law and advocacy.
New knowledge on the links between penal violence and social reproduction.
New knowledge on feminist and anti-carceral social movements.

Silvana's research explores the limitations of international human rights and the perils of relying primarily on criminal law to counteract violence against women. Her research is participatory, community-based and informed by the experiences of survivors, organisers, activists and practitioners, especially from the Global South. 

Silvana's current work explores how anticarceral and feminist collectives in Ecuador and the UK respond to human rights frameworks that prescribe a punitive response to VAW. She is also developing a project on how carceral violence affects women 'outside and around' prisons, that is, women who are not incarcerated but have connections to prisons, such as those supporting incarcerated relatives and friends.