Grayson Peel, Class of 2023, Cultural Anthropology, has received a Fulbright award to Ecuador from September 2024-June 2025. Their project, entitled “Testimonios de confrontación: LGBTQ+ policy and extra-legal violence in Ecuador,” seeks to illuminate the societal factors contributing to the discrepancies between Ecuador’s pro-LGBTQ+ policies and quotidian violence against queer and trans Ecuadorians. As a visiting scholar at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito, they will conduct interviews and participant observation among survivors of violence, specifically at the hands of Ecuador’s widespread network of conversion therapy clinics, and LGBTQ+ activists. Through engaging with my interlocutors’ narratives of struggle, survival, and resistance, they hope to inspire future interventions in policy that more effectively safeguard the rights of LGBTQ+ Ecuadorians. They envision this project as a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort between themselves and the Ecuadorian scholars, activists, and LGBTQ+ community members with whom they will be working, and will be sharing their findings with the a transnational public audience in the form of a multimedia ethnography.
2023 Cultural Anthropology Alum Grayson Peel receives Fullbright Award
