Internalised oppression is an inevitable feature of any system of domination and subordination — the process by which both inferiority and superiority are learned, embodied, and reproduced in everyday life. 

Drawing on her research on internalised racism in Mexico, developed as part of her British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship project “The Structure Within: Internalised Oppression, Defensiveness and Resentment”, and part of the Public Campaign: The Structure Within, Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa examines how racial hierarchy survives not only through structures but through the intimate relationships and self-understandings of those it shapes. 

She traces the “logics” through which inferiorisation is enacted — immobilisation, disarticulation and distraction — alongside the defensive logics through which superiority is protected, such as perfectionism, urgency, and the sense that there is “only one right way”. 

Rather than treating oppression as a split between oppressors and oppressed, this talk asks what changes when we recognise that everyone is implicated in its cycles. What keeps people in place? What are the rewards of maintaining things as they are? And can a perspective on internalised oppression open new possibilities for antiracist practice in the workplace, the academy, activism, and everyday life?

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black-mestiza Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is also a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the intersectional lived experience of ‘race’ and racism in Mexico and Latin America; antiracism and academic-based impact; feminist theory and intersectionality; the dressed body, material culture and inequalities.

She is co-editor, with Peter Wade, of Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), which shares the findings of a project on antiracist practices and discourses in Latin America, comparing experiences in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. In May 2026 she co-published the article “A relational approach to comparisons of race and racism in the Americas and beyond” in Ethnic and Racial Studies alongside Graziella Moraes Silva, Christina Sue and Peter Wade.

She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2022–23) for the project “The Structure Within: Internalised Oppression, Defensiveness and Resentment”. Mónica has recently completed the scoping and design of a newly proposed Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST) from 2023 to 2026 with seed funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.