MA in Communications, PUCP · Independent researcher · Applying to PhD programs in platform studies and HCI
I think about technology from below and from within: from the memory of those who worked without anyone calling it work, from the voices the algorithm does not amplify. I write to understand who each new technology leaves out, and how people use it, bend it and turn it into culture.
Presenting Testimoniability at AoIR2026 · Regeneration(s) · Mexico City · October 15, 2026
Co-leading a participatory session at CADi 2026 · Interconexiones · Lima · October 22, 2026
About me
I am a Peruvian philosopher and communication researcher. My family comes from Huaraz and Ayacucho, and that history is where my questions start. The memory of the women in my family who worked day to day without job security carries as much weight in an argument about precarious labor as a statistic.
My work sits where technology, culture and politics meet. I lead user research, design digital communication and study how platforms shape everyday life. I move from concrete experience to concept, and I ask the same political question of every new technology: whose voice is missing here?
How do marginalized communities persist in expressing themselves within technologies built in contexts that never imagined them?
Every claim I make rests on verified sources. The people I work with are subjects with agency, never data.
Papers
Research on platforms, protest and testimony in Peru, from my MA thesis onward.
Lopez del Pozo, M. · Selected Papers of Internet Research, AoIR2025, Niterói, Brazil · DOI 10.5210/spir.v2024i0.15225
Lopez del Pozo, M. · In the panel Latin American creator (sub)cultures on TikTok: Visibility, resistance, and contextual research, organized by Tom Divon, Daniela Jaramillo-Dent and Adriana Amaral · Selected Papers of Internet Research, AoIR2025 · DOI 10.5210/spir.v2024i0.15401
Lopez del Pozo, M. · Master's thesis, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú · Approved with distinction · Mixed methods: technical walkthrough, content analysis of 286 videos, 8 in-depth interviews
Lopez del Pozo, M. · Roundtable Comunicación política: estrategias y prácticas en la era digital (Political communication: strategies and practices in the digital era), moderated by Santiago Pedraglio · Encuentro Anual de Investigación, Innovación y Creación PUCP 2024 (PUCP Annual Meeting on Research, Innovation and Creation), Lima, September 19, 2024
Lopez del Pozo, M. · AoIR2026, Regeneration(s), Mexico City, October 15, 2026
(Designing connections from evidence on the ground) · With Ella Goñez, Luz Alcántara and Nicolas Vargas · A participatory session built on a Chakakuna case · CADi 2026 · Interconexiones, PUCP Academic Design Congress, Lima, October 22, 2026
Lopez del Pozo, M. & Jaramillo-Dent, D.
Lopez del Pozo, M. · Media discourse analysis
An emergent affordance: how platform features open space for subaltern subjects to recount their experiences on their own terms, carrying Latin American testimonial traditions into digital infrastructure. It works through digital orality, the body and the device as one testimonial act, and collective voice.
Projects
Communication with workers' organizations, and research with the people who use products and services.
I helped many workers' unions find their way in the digital world: to connect with the workers they represent and to press their demands on employers and the state.
Content, moderation, campaign strategy and social media presence, including the campaign Agua con derechos against labor outsourcing.
Weekly programs on local radio stations in Ica, San Martín, Piura and La Libertad, mostly with agricultural workers. The workers hosted. I handled the rest: coordination, run sheets, guests, choice of topics and news.
Workers really did call in, with complaints and demands. One of the programs later grew into a podcast.
They start from one question: who gets to speak? Speaking in public is not equally open to everyone. Social and material conditions have long kept subaltern subjects, such as impoverished women, from being heard.
A workshop does not undo that. It can open a space to practice speaking for one's own organization, on one's own terms. I used participatory methods, and also worked with grassroots union leaders.
I prototype digital products with the people who will use them. Some have not launched yet, like Siku, a safe and collaborative space to store the audiovisual archive of citizen protest.
With Chakakuna, I worked with young people to prototype a mobile app that helps them manage their money.
At Chakakuna I adapted a European set of conversation cards for parents and children, built around gender and masculinities, to Latin American contexts. Through interviews with parents from several Latin American countries, the product became a new, adapted set of cards.
More broadly, I have led fieldwork testing prototypes with teams and real users.
Research from the user's side: understanding people's perspectives and needs around the services that companies and the state offer them. Mainly through in-depth interviews and ethnography.
Storytelling runs through all of my work. Radio programs, campaigns, workshops and research: each piece is built around a story and the people who tell it.
Contact
hola@melachay.com
CV available on request.