Doctoral Candidate Karla Alvarado Romero

Karla Alvarado is a doctoral candidate at HCIAS and at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences and a member of the HCIAS doctoral programme ‘Communication and Society in Ibero-America’. She is a scholarship holder of the Baden-Württemberg State Graduate Funding Programme, a member of the Heidelberg Center for Digital Humanities (HCDH) and a member of the Heidelberg Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS).

Her research focuses on the intersection of information technologies (IT) and commerce, with a particular emphasis on the role of social media as digital mediation platforms for the growing phenomenon of ‘social commerce’. She has expertise in regional studies, focussing on trade relations between Latin America and China. She is also actively researching the region's relations with the US and the EU. Her work also includes the economic and strategic impact of big tech companies on international trade regulation, global governance and digital trade policy making. Her doctoral project is supervised by Junior Professor Dr Alejandro Ecker of the HCIAS.

Karla's research experience includes a research stay at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at the US-Mexico Center at Rice University in Houston, Texas, a doctoral fellowship from the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (now: CONAHCYT) and a research stay at the Center for China-Mexico-Studies (CECHIMEX) of the Faculty of Economics at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM) as a fellow of the China Research Fellowship Program 2022.