Fellows

Ranu Basu is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at York University. Her research and teaching interests relate to the geographies of marginality, diversity and social justice in cities; power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; geopolitics of subaltern cosmopolitanism, critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies including critical GIS.

Her projects have explored the impacts of neoliberalization of educational restructuring in Ontario; multiculturalism in schools through questions of 'integration'; social sustainability and the meaning of public space as it relates to migrants; and politics of infrastructural provision. Her work extends internationally to Cuba and India and she is PI on a SSHRC funded project entitled: Subalterity, education and welfare cities that historically traces the geopolitical impacts of displacement on cities and schools; and the everyday politics of resistance in Havana, Toronto and Kolkata. 

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Cuba

Keywords: power, space and activism; anti-imperialism and post-colonial geographies; geopolitics of subaltern cosmopolitanism; critical geographies of education; and spatial methodologies including critical GIS.

Professor Canel's research focuses on the role that social movements, community organizations and NGOs play in shaping or resisting development agendas through contentious strategies and/or through partnerships with institutional actors. He is currently working on the growth of socio-environmental conflicts arising from the intensification of resource extraction promoted by the new development agendas of leftist governments in Latin America (neo-developmentalism and new extractivism).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Latin America

Keywords: State-Civil society, social movements, participatory democracy

Patrick holds a PhD in Political Economy from the political science department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is currently a sessional assistant professor in the Business and Society program at York University in Toronto, Canada. His doctoral dissertation analyzed public policies for rural development and processes of sustainable agricultural transition led by small farmer organizations and co-operatives in Ecuador during the Pink Tide government of Rafael Correa (2006-2017). Since completing his dissertation research, he has begun to research rural development and peasant livelihoods in Peru and in the future intends to do comparative historical research on the long-term impacts of the 1970s agrarian reform processes and the evolution of rural state-society relations in both countries. He is currently completing a co-authored study on the history of the Norandino Agrarian Co-operative of organic coffee, cacao and sugar producers based in Piura, northern Peru and the role of the Fair Trade movement. He is also working on several co-authored publications on the impacts of COVID-19 and rural livelihoods and informal economy in Peru as well as on “neo-developmentalism” and natural resource policy in Latin America. His research interests include “neo-developmentalism” in Latin America, comparative Latin American politics and political economy, economic sociology and anthropology and state-society relations in agriculture and rural development.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela

Keywords: Rural development, social economy and social innovation, Ecuador, Peru, neo-structuralism/ neo-developmentalism in Latin America, comparative politics and Left political parties, state-society relations, economic sociology and anthropology.

Alison Crosby is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Her research and publications use an anti-racist anti-colonial feminist lens to explore survivors’ multifaceted struggles for agency and subjectivity in the aftermath of militarized violence. She is currently completing a book manuscript with Professor M. Brinton Lykes on gender and reparation in Guatemala, based on four years of feminist participatory action research with Mayan women survivors of violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala, and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). And with Dr. Malathi de Alwis, she is exploring memorialization as a site of contestation in Guatemala and Sri Lanka in a project entitled The inhabitance of loss: A transnational feminist project on memorialization, funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Guatemala

Keywords: Transitional justice; gender, violence and trauma; memory and memorialization; anti-racist feminist participatory action research

Dr. Davis's research focuses on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the intersections of the literatures of the Caribbean, the United States and Canada and her work encourages an intertextual cross-cultural dialogue about Black women's experiences in diaspora. She is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation (Northwestern University Press, 2022) and co-editor with Carl E. James of Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence (Fernwood 2012).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Jamaica, Canada, Caribbean diaspora in Canada

Keywords: Caribbean, African American and Black Canadian Literatures and Theatre, Social Histories of the African Diaspora, Black Cultural Studies; Anti-Racist Feminism; Black Youth Studies