Ana Maria Huaita Alfaro

I am from Lima, Peru, and currently based in this city. My academic and professional background is varied in terms of the disciplines I have covered during my training. I did my undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP). During these studies I started to get engaged with development work by taking elective modules in social studies and voluntary work with social entrepreneurs. Later I studied a postgraduate diploma in Design and Management of Social Projects, also at PUCP, and it was key to help me define a career path from there on. A year later I started the MPhil in Environment, Society and Development at the University of Cambridge, which provided me with valuable knowledge about development studies and opportunities in that field, for which I went back to Peru. There I worked as research consultant for international and interdisciplinary teams, mainly in topics related to the impact analysis of the use of IT tools and IT training by people with disabilities. Before coming to London, I was working for the Tourism Research Institute at San Martin de Porres University, in Lima, and my exploration on the interplay of tourism, culture and human development served as a basis for shaping the research project for my PhD. My current commitment is on directing research outputs towards the revitalization and persistence of collective local spaces as marketplaces and by raising their dynamism, economically and socially, raise awareness on their impact as means for sustaining collective urban futures.

•    Thesis title: Encounters at Lima’s inner-city marketplaces: negotiating fragmentation and common living in urban Peru

Key words: food markets, encounters, urban fragmentations, sense of commons, Peru

Primary supervisor: Andrew Harris (Department of Geography, UCL)

Sponsor: PRONABEC – National Scholarship Programme, Ministry of Education of Peru