Malena started her LSE-funded PhD at the Department of Gender Studies in 2023. Her research project investigates the racialised and gendered occupational segregation around care and domestic work in Spain through the lens of social reproduction theory. Malena is theoretically grounded in Marxist feminist scholarship and critical sociological studies of labour, gender, race and migration.

Malena holds an MA in Social Policy, Labour and Welfare from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2021) and a BA in International Relations and Chinese from SOAS (2020). Prior to joining LSE, she worked for the International Labour Organisation as part of the research team for the Social Dialogue Report 2022 on the role of collective bargaining in mitigating the socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19 crisis on workers around the globe.

Her research interests include: social reproduction theory; Mediterranean care regimes and the global political economy of care; migration, racialisation and mobility regimes; the political economy of global labour arbitrage; sectoral and occupational segregation; local, national, transnational labour movements.

Supervisory team: Dr Ania Plomien and Dr Leticia Sabsay.