Welcome, I am Vivianna

I’m so glad you landed here.

I am a multilingual, multicultural scholar and practitioner of human development — a sense-maker of the collective. My life flows between two Pacific shores — Peru and Australia — and so does my work: weaving inner wisdom with the outer world of peace and development.

For more than two decades, I’ve explored the wonders of the inner world — how consciousness shapes our ability to find agency even in adversity. This path led me to write my first academic book, Agency in Poverty and War: Consciousness in Rural Human Development. “It reflects the journey of identities and their positive and negative associations made in our consciousness that bring an assumed order to our intellect and yet fragment the wholeness of our humanity. I craft a new narrative to create a transdisciplinary discussion for scholars and practitioners working with people who have experienced the hazards of oppression in poverty, repression and aggression in war and are involved with wicked problems. Also, my analysis can benefit those taking part in projects of truth commissions and in periods of transitional justice mechanisms. The exploration opened in me, a development and peace action researcher, a new integrative way to see systems in the aftermath of armed conflict”.

Working alongside rural communities restored me to my roots — the wisdom of oral culture, the power of vulnerability, and the hologram of human agency emerging from those living in poverty and conflict. These encounters deepened my belief that awareness and embodiment are the doors to knowledge.