Alejandra Cueto Piazza

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. My research examines how civil society organizations and social movements produce knowledge about marginalized populations, and how this knowledge shapes state institutions and public policy. My work has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and The Sociological Quarterly, with a forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Contemporary Development Sociology. My research has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Dissertation Improvement Grant, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Scholarship on state-civil society relations has typically characterized their interaction as collaboration rooted in political alliance, outright contestation, or cooptation. My work challenges this framework by tracing how social movements produce knowledge about marginalized populations, and explaining when and why this knowledge becomes a powerful tool for negotiating public policy with state bureaucrats. I challenge the assumption that collaboration requires political alignment, showing instead that civil society organizations and state agencies can develop pragmatic ties to advance shared policy goals even across ideological divides – a process I term “pragmatic co-production”.

In previous work, I incorporated a global perspective to understand how informal workers and slum dwellers across different countries make sense of their working and living conditions, and how they organize collectively to change them. Looking ahead, I want to focus on how the case of homelessness in Los Angeles connects to questions of knowledge, visibility, and state power.

I hold a PhD in Sociology from Brown University and an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University. I completed my undergraduate and licentiate degrees in Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

• Ph.D. Sociology, Brown University, 2026
• M.A. Sociology, Columbia University, 2018