Bio
Paz Peña is a consultant and author who has dedicated more than 15 years to studying the intersection between technologies, social justice and gender for government, civil society and international agencies. Her fields of expertise include cybersecurity, digital security and the environment. She has worked on research for international organizations such as the Association for Progressive Communications exploring how to integrate gender approaches into cybersecurity policies and was also a consultant to the Chilean Cybersecurity Coordination Unit integrating the intersectional gender perspective in the Chilean government’s last national cybersecurity strategy. Paz also regularly teaches the subject in the Cybersecurity and Gender course at the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile.
Paz’s work also explores how the malicious use of digital technologies affects users’ human rights (with an emphasis on activists, journalists and collectives); for example, she developed a set of guidelines on gender and protection of journalists for Article 19 and evaluated online gender aggressions against women human rights defenders in Mesoamerica with IM-Defensoras.
Paz has spent the last seven years researching the socio-environmental impacts of digital technologies in Latin America. In 2021, she founded the Latin American Institute of Terraforming (terraforminglatam.net), a unique space to reflect on the relationship between technology and the ecological and climate crisis from a feminist perspective. In 2022, together with artist and activist Dane Tapia, she published “Surveillance in the Anthropocene,” an artist research project that delved into the conditions of land and Indigenous defenders subject to state and private surveillance in Chile and Canada. In 2023, she published a summary of her research on the socio-environmental struggles behind digitization in the book Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas (Technologies for a Burning Planet) from the prestigious Ibero-American publishing house Paidós.
Paz holds a bachelor’s degree in social communication (Pontificia Universidad Católica Valparaíso, Chile) and an M.Sc. in gender studies and culture (Universidad de Chile). She is based in Santiago, Chile.