Social Work | Technology | Policy

Email: vcope@protonmail.com

When interpersonal violence occurs within our communities, what is our individual, collective, and institutional response? How can we make those responses serve survivors better? The goal of my research is to better understand what aspects of our current social care apparatus are not working for those who have been harmed by interpersonal violence, in efforts to envision and support alternative healing approaches in our communities.

My research aims to explore these questions through:

• Collaboration with survivors of interpersonal violence to explore how they are simultaneously impacted by violence and institutional "data-driven" responses to said violence.
• Investigating “data-driven” decision-making processes within U.S. social institutions as they relate to violence, through the perspective of workers within the care economy (e.g.: social workers, caseworkers).

My past and current projects have specifically looked into how social institutions rely on socio-technical systems and surveillance to make critical or "high risk" decisions around violence. For example: the decision to terminate parental rights permanently, and mandatory reporting processes. I work alongside those who have experienced child abuse, child neglect, sexual violence, technology-based gender based violence, and retraumatization through state violence vis a vis social institutions.

I am proficient in multiple qualitative methods as well as policy analysis, and primarily conduct Community-Driven Participatory Action Research. As a Black and Ilocano disabled scholar, my work is rooted in a Black Feminist Abolitionist Epistemology and also guided by Sins Invalids 10 Disability Justice principles.