Irma Molina

Irma Molina was born in El Salvador, grew up in Costa Rica as a political refugee and immigrated to Canada in 1991. She received her Masters of Arts in Social Anthropology from York University in 2000 and her PhD in the same discipline from the University of Toronto in 2010. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), her doctoral project is based on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. Her dissertation explores the interconnection of indigeneity, warfare, and representation in the context of the Zapatista struggle for Indigenous rights and territorial autonomy. Irma’s research interests include the analytics and ethnography of war, everyday-life theory, and ethics and fieldwork in contexts of political instability. She is presently working on two themes: one examines some of the ethical dilemmas researchers face in contexts of political violence and the other one provides insight into some of the ways in which localized discourses of war structure people’s daily lives and perceptions of reality.