Dr Alejandra Castano-Echeverri

Dr Alejandra Castano-Echeverri is an interdisciplinary scholar who has worked within and across the fields of media and communication studies, sociology, cultural studies and film studies. Her current fields of research include intersectional and post-intentional phenomenological approaches to labour, media industries, and moral economies.

Alejandra completed her PhD “Media Work and Public Value: Producing Public Service Television under State Control in Colombia” at the University of Leicester in 2017. Her research involved primary research with public television commissioners and independent producers, and her findings exposed that where governance is state-driven, workers, regardless of their role, subscribe to dominant narratives and discourses that justify their work, and thus contribute to keeping themselves under prescribed creativity.

Her research experience has allowed her to accumulate sufficient and relevant specialist knowledge on labour processes, workers' experiences and the organisation of their work. She has studied work and workers in the increasingly precarised creative industries in Latin America, conducting qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, in addition to large scale surveys that reveal local patterns of work precariousness and de-professionalisation.

In recent studies she has utilised intersectional approaches to studying critical issues such as working conditions, experiences, and expectations of employees and workers in the screen industries.

She has also conducted audience and prospective studies, which gave her not only an intense introduction to fieldwork research, but also helped her develop a strong commitment towards pursuing a research career and developed a network of colleagues in diverse fields of political economy, sociology, and cultural studies that continues to this day.