National Women’s Studies Association and the University of Illinois Press are pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 First Book Prize!

Vivian D. Rodríguez-Rocha

Project title: Countertopographies of Care: The Rise of Care-Activism in the Movement for Women’s Lives in Mexico

Rodríguez-Rocha is a feminist political geographer whose work focuses on the spatialities of social reproduction, the embodiment of labor processes, and the geopolitics of gender violence. Her current research explores how present-day feminist activism in Mexico has seen a marked turn toward care-based tactics, even as feminist protests have become increasingly confrontational. She is Grant Manager for the Penn-Mellon Just Futures Initiative, “Dispossessions in the Americas: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present,” at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from Penn State University. She is originally from Mexico City.

For more information on the prize, visit https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/NWSAPrize.html