Dr. Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland serves as the Senior Director of the Institute on Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace Initiative at the City University of New York School of Law. The Institute works to reimagine policymaking from the perspective of social movements, bringing those most impacted by crisis and conflict into the process of policy development, and serves as a hub for translocal organizing, research, and scholarship. Dr. Luttrell-Rowland serves as the managing director of the Institute, and has helped lead its development, design, and implementation. Dr. Luttrell-Rowland previously served as Director of the Women, Peace and Security Program at Columbia University, where she worked closely with women changemakers from around the globe and probed new methods for listening to, and disseminating, lessons from their everyday activism. Having held leadership roles in varied and complex settings, Dr. Luttrell-Rowland brings years of strategic vision, leadership, and program design experience.
Dr. Luttrell-Rowland holds a PhD in International Development from the University of Bath, and an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford. She has scholarly expertise in the areas of economic justice, participatory practices, human rights, and social movements. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including the United Kingdom’s British Council, Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy, the Law and Society Association, the Harvard Kennedy School, Society of Latin American Studies, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship. In 2018, she served as a Delegate to Canada’s G7 Presidency, where she supported the work of Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee on the Gender Equality Advisory Council (2018-19).
Her book Political Children: Violence, Rights and Labor in Peru was published with Stanford University Press in 2023. Grounded in extensive interviews with child workers in Lima, Peru, as well as longitudinal ethnographic experience, historical analysis, and archival work, Dr. Luttrell-Rowland traces the politics and history of child rights movements in Peru and young people’s perspectives of everyday state violence and austerity. In doing so, Political Children examines the contradictions at stake, and spatial logics used, of public policy narratives in which the Peruvian state is cast as a neutral site for engagement and action. Through criticism and activism, the young people in this book demonstrate that such narratives divorce state power from the very places in which it is experienced as structural violence. Conceiving of politics and power through a language of affect, longing, and desire, Dr. Luttrell-Rowland reveals the urgent need of finding new methods to turn to those made most marginal as knowers and experts of state power.