Oscar Pedraza

Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas is a historian and anthropologist with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from City University of New York, Graduate Center. He co-directs the Plano Negativo Studio in Colombia and is part of the Latin American Network of Forensic and Visual Investigations. He served as a main researcher in the Colombian Truth Commission in the project ‘Huellas de desaparición’.

He is currently an ACLS fellow at the Center of Law, History and Culture at University of Southern California. He has worked extensively with grassroots movements associated with indigenous, farmer, labor, and victim communities in Colombia and Latin America. Pedraza Vargas specializes in the analysis of transnational human rights institutions, discourses, and practices that define the value of life and death in cases of coal-related violence in Colombia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.