Associate Fellows

Cecilia Rocha (PhD) is the director and a professor in the School of Nutrition, and associate researcher and past director of the Centre for Studies in Food Security at Ryerson. Her research interests include:

Assessing the social efficiency of food security initiatives and programs.
The role of market failures in food insecurity.
The effectiveness of markets as policy tools.
From 2004 to 2010, Rocha was director of the project Building Capacity in Food Security in Brazil, developed in partnership with the Reference Centre for Food and Nutrition Security in Rio de Janeiro, and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.

She has authored key papers on the innovative and pioneering policies and programs in food security in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and has been an invited speaker at many international meetings, such as the 2009 United Nations High Level Meeting on Food Security for All in Madrid, Spain, and the 2009 Parliamentary Meeting on the Occasion of the World Food Summit in Rome, Italy.

Rocha was an active member of the Toronto Food Policy Council from 2006 to 2011, and participated in the development of the Toronto Food Strategy (2009-2010). She has conducted research on food security conditions among immigrant populations in Toronto, and the manifestation of food sovereignty in an indigenous settlement in Brazil.

In 2012, she was invited to be part of a distinguished expert panel on the State of Knowledge of Food Security in Northern Canada by the Council of Canadian Academies.

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

Keyword(s): Food security/ insecurity, food programs, the role of markets as policy tools

Latin American politics and critical security studies; exploration of new conceptions of security in Latin America, including those related to insurgenices, race and class, as well as production of oil.

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

Keywords: Security studies, insurgencies, race and class

Célia Romulus joined the department of International Studies as an Assistant Professor. Célia Romulus completed her PhD in the department of Political Studies at Queen’s University (Canada).  Célia’s doctoral research focused on the normalization of gendered state repression under the Duvalier dictatorship; how these systematized forms of violence shaped movements of population out of Haiti; and the notion of citizenship as experienced by multiple generations of migrants. Her research and teaching draws from Anti-Oppression and Anti-Racist Education; Afro and Decolonial Feminisms and explores questions related to explores the Gender and Politics of Memory, Migrations, Citizenship, Political violence; Interdisciplinary Methods.

Prior to completing her PhD, Célia Romulus worked as a programme director in the areas of gender-based violence in public spaces and security sector reform for UN WOMEN and continues to work as  a consultant and trainer on questions related to anti-oppression, anti-racism, Black femininities/masculinities, gender-mainstreaming in public policies and in development. 

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Haiti

Keywords: Anti-Oppression and Anti-Racist Education; Afro and Decolonial Feminisms, Gender and Politics of Memory, Migrations, Citizenship, Political violence; Interdisciplinary Methods.

Joanna Anneke Rummens is a multilingual anthropologist/sociologist whose research explores the links between identity, diversity, health and wellbeing, with special focus on vulnerable and marginalized populations. She has undertaken fieldwork with a wide variety of cultural groups in different societal contexts and employs an explicitly interdisciplinary, mixed-methodological, comparative perspective. Her work reflects a strong commitment to policy- and practice-relevant research, collaborative research partnerships with representatives from diverse ethno-cultural communities, as well as effective research translation / transfer and knowledge exchange / mobilization with a wide range of key stakeholders. Dr. Rummens has served in an advisory capacity in the areas of identity, diversity, citizenship and health to various governmental departments and was a Member of the Advisory Committee to Statistics Canada and Canadian Heritage for Canada

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

Keywords: Identity, diversity, health and wellbeing

Frans Schryer has published two books on the history and anthropology of the Huasteca region of Mexico, and two books dealing with postwar Dutch immigrants in Ontario. He is currently engaged in a long-terms research project in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.

His research interests are: Ethnohistory; Class and ethnicity in Mexico; Dutch farm immigrants; The impact of globalization on indigenous peoples of Mexico (particularly the Alto Balsas Nahuas); Transnationalism.

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

Keywords: Ethnohistory; Class and ethnicity 

I received my PhD in Political Science from York University and my MA from the University of Toronto. I also have a journalism degree from Carleton University.

Prior to joining Laurier, I worked as a journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Following that, during the early 1990s, I worked in Nicaragua as a researcher examining how structural adjustment policies affected women employed by the government, based in Managua.

My research is on the democracy-building and economic development programs of international actors (governments and international organizations) in Central America and the Caribbean. During the last 10 years, I focused primarily on how outsiders have affected economic and political developments in Haiti.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Central America, the Caribbean, Haiti

Keywords: Democracy building, economic development,

Dr. Tyler Shipley holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University and is Professor of Culture, Society, and Commerce at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. He is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), and is a longstanding member of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS).  He has written several articles in leading journals in the fields of Political Economy and Latin American Studies, and is a contributing author in the forthcoming Organized Violence and the Expansion of Capital. In 2016, he wrote a commissioned report on civil-military relations in Honduras for the Chr Michelson Institute in Bergen, Norway, and he has written for local and mainstream media across North America and Europe. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Honduras, Latin America, Canada

Keywords: postcolonial theory, imperialism, neoliberalism, social movements

Antonio Torres-Ruiz is a Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Global Development Studies and Political Science at the University of Toronto (UofT). Before, he taught at York University (as full-time faculty for four years in the Equity Studies program) as well as in the Centre for International Studies at El Colegio de México and at ITAM (Both of them in Mexico City). A significant part of his research work deals with democratization, comparative studies, human rights, identity politics, global political economy, and globalization, with a special focus on the Americas.

His published contributions include articles and book reviews for several academic journals such as Latin American Research Review (U.S.), International Journal (Canada), História, Ciencias, Saude (Brazil), Journal of Latin American Studies (U.K.), Latin American Politics and Society (U.S.), Working Papers Series, CIDE (Mexico), and Crítica Contemporánea (Uruguay). He also co-authored a book chapter and co-edited a volume on contentious politics in North America with the late UofT professor Stephen Clarkson and contributed with a chapter on “The NGOization of HIV/AIDS activism in Mexico” to the three-volume analysis titled Global HIV/AIDS Politics, Policy, and Activism: Persistent Challenges and Emerging Issues, edited by Raymond Smith (Columbia University), published by Praeger. More recently, he published a single-authored book on The Political Economy of HIV/AIDS in Mexico, by Common Ground Research Networks, University of Illinois Research Park (May 2018).

Two of his most recent projects are: a) a critique of political science as a discipline, with a special focus on the ontology and genealogy of democracy and the human rights discourse, and b) A Ford Foundation-supported project on Afro-descendants and participatory action research in Cuba and Mexico.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Cuba, Brazil, and North America (Canada, Mexico, and the United States)

Keywords: Political Economy and Globalization, Health and HIV/AIDS Politics and Policies, Human Rights, Identity Politics, Afrodescendants in Latin America, Sexual Diversity Politics