Dr Valentina Montoya Robledo

Valentina's current work is organised around three key themes: gender and mobilities of care; mobility, gender and race and the Right to the City; and cross-border commutes and gender.

Valentina was appointed in 2023. She became a non-stipendiary junior research fellow at Wolfson College (2024). Valentina previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Law at Universidad de los Andes (2021-2023), and consultant for the Transport Gender Lab at the Interamerican Development Bank (2019-2021). Her work draws on a range of qualitative and quantitative methods and currently focuses on Latin America and Africa. Valentina's doctoral research at Harvard University (2020) focused on domestic workers’ commuting experiences in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia. Valentina’s work to date has been funded by the John Fell Fund as part of the University of Oxford, the Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship by the World Resources Institute, the John F Meyer Transportation fund from Harvard Kennedy School, and the Harvard-Los Andes fund. 

Gender and mobilities of care. Work on this theme has focused on different aspects of domestic workers’ commuting experiences in Latin American cities considering the legal rule in place. Recently, this has involved examining the impact of very low-quality commutes on domestic workers’ family dependents, studying their commuting strategies in the face of low-quality service with emphasis on the COVID-19 time-period, and critiquing public care and mobility policies and programs from the standpoint of domestic workers.  

Mobility, gender and race, and the Right to the City. Under this theme, Valentina has examined how the Right to the City effectively operates through the lenses of urban mobility, and how it intersects with gender and racial discrimination. This strand of work draws on gender and mobility literature, transport racism and critical cartography. It delves, on the one hand, into the pervasive gendered and racial violence against LGBTQI+ people, and Afro-Latin American populations while moving around the cities. On the other hand, it analyses the cartographic gap between how transport experts design and portray cities and how domestic workers experience them on the ground. 

Women cross-border commuters. This new strand of research focuses on women who commute across international borders in low- and middle-income countries. Studying these commutes will allow more understanding about the risks and frictions that actual people negotiate every day, as well as the gap between the written law and how it is daily practiced, the room it leaves for non-state actors’ intervention, and possible government responses to improve women's cross-border commutes.   

Valentina strives to build lasting collaborations with organisations beyond academia. In recent years she has worked closely as a lawyer and activist with the Colombian Domestic Workers’ Union- UTRASD. 

She currently directs the transmedia project Invisible Commutes, and launched her first film Invisible (2023) on domestic workers commutes in Latin America.

Valentina has also worked in policymaking and consultancy with the United Nations Environment Program, the Colombian Ministry of Transport, the European Investment Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank. 

• Montoya Robledo, V. (2024). Overlooked mobility: domestic workers commuting in Bogotá, Medellín, and São Paulo (T. Coggin & R. Madhav, Eds.; 1st ed.). Routledge. 
• Montoya-Robledo V. (2023) "That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them": Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City." Data and Policy, 5:e41. doi:10.1017/dap.2023.34 
• Montoya-Robledo, Valentina Iguavita, Laura & López, Segundo. (2022). Breathing in and out: Domestic workers high exposure to air pollution in Bogota's public transportation system. Environment and Planning C Politics and Space. 1-19. 10.1177/23996544221077810. 
• Montoya-Robledo, V.; Montes, L.; Carvajal, V.; Galarza DC.; Pipicano, W.; Peña, A.; Pipicano, C.; Lopez, JS.; Fernández, M.; Porras, I.; Arias, N.; and Miranda, L. (2020). Gender stereotypes affecting active mobility of care in Bogotá. Transportation Research Part D.
• Montoya-Robledo, V and Escovar-Álvarez, G. (2020). Domestic workers’ commutes in Bogotá: Transportation, gender and social exclusion. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. 139. 400-411. 10.1016/j.tra.2020.07.019. 

See Google Scholar for full overview of publications