Isabella C. Restrepo

Isabella Restrepo earned her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies with an emphasis on race and nation at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023. She was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow prior to her appointment at UC San Diego.

Dr. Restrepo’s research theorizes at the intersections of feminist abolition studies and girlhood studies to argue that the foster care system is an extension of the carceral state that utilizes carceral tactics against racialized youth. Dr. Restrepo's research offers a critical lens that excavates the criminalization and pathologization that is inherent in the foster care system and centers the experiences of racialized Latina foster girls with carceral tools like behavioral diagnosis and mandated services.