Associate Fellows

I am a Cultural Anthropologist with special interests in Latin America, development discourses and ethnography, environmentalism, women and gender, feminist research - and teaching undergraduate students! I did research for my PhD in southern Mexico on a Canadian development project, the Calakmul Model Forest. This involved participant observation research with development workers, campesinoleaders, and Yucatec Maya campesinas. I am working on developing a new research project on food, environment and protest that would involve research in Mexico and Canada. I speak Spanish, French and a little Yucatec Maya.

I came to Kwantlen from Mount Royal University in Calgary, and before that the University of Calgary. Over the last decade I have taught courses on Latin America, Anthropology of Gender, Globalization, Indigenous Studies, Ethnographic Writing, Anthropological Research Methods, Anthropological Theory, and Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. I am very excited to be working with students at Kwantlen now. I see understanding of Cultural Anthropology as essential to living in a globalizing world, and encourage my classes to explore the multicultural worlds we live in.

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

Keywords: Development, ethnography, environmentalism, women and gender, feminism

Claudio Palomares-Salas is Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Queen's University. He is the author of Mexican Canto Nuevo: Music, Politics, and Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2025);The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde (Brill, 2020), the novel El lugar más triste para soñar (Lugar Común, 2014), and of numerous academic articles. His areas of specialization are 20^th and 21^st centuries Spanish and Latin American literature, Latin American music, the Nueva Canción movements in Mexico and Latin America (1960-1980s), the transatlantic Hispanic avant-garde movements (1910-1920s), and the Latin American diasporas in the U.S. and Canada. In addition to his academic work, he is an active drummer in Montreal who has toured and recorded with various artists in Mexico, Canada, and abroad.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Mexico, Latin America, Spain, Canada, United States

Keywords: Latin American and Spanish Literature, Latin American Music, Transatlantic Hispanic Avant-Gardes (1910-1920s), Mexican and Latin American Political Song Movements (1960s-1980s), Latin American Diasporas in the U.S. and Canada.

Morgan Poteet is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada. His current research interests are in the areas of migration, youth, criminalization, and trauma. He uses qualitative approaches including arts-based methods such as Digital Storytelling and Photovoice to explore the lives of youth from the Central American community in Toronto, and inter-generational dynamics among Salvadorians in Canada and across borders.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Canada, Central America.

Keywords:Migration, youth criminalization, racialization, trauma, identity and belonging.

Josh studies the role language practices have played in the colonization of the Americas. He is the author or coeditor of four books, the most recent Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Language in the Americas (U Arizona Press, 2023). He has collaborated on the translation of two books of Latin American philosophy, Heidegger´s Shadow by José Pablo Feinmann (with María Constanza Guzmán; Texas Tech 2016) and Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América by Rodolfo Kusch (with María Lugones; Duke 2010). He also engages in ethnographic and participatory research on structural and institutional violence, race and gender violence, incarceration and life after incarceration.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Latin America, especially Argentina and Colombia

Keywords: Latin American philosophy; translation; epistemic injustice; colonialism; prison abolition; migrant detention; structural violence; race and gender violence

Dr. Margarida Gandara Rauen, who goes by the art name Margie Rauen (she/her), is an independent visiting scholar, having retired as a professor of Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste (UNICENTRO) in Paraná, Brazil, where she served in the Department of Arts and the Graduate Program of Education. Margie was first hosted at CERLAC by Dr. Honor Ford-Smith as a visiting scholar and became an Associate Fellow of the cluster of Arts, Literatures and Languages in 2022. Since then, Margie has pursued research about feminist activism, intercultural performances, identities, and herstories in the LAWG Special Collection of CERLAC’s Resource Centre.

Her works encompass gender, ethnic-racial categories, participatory poetics, and intercultural approaches to creative processes and to curriculum redefinition from the stance of intersectional feminism, fostering peace, equity, respect. As a professor at UNICENTRO, she taught required courses covering theoretical paradigms, post-structuralist and feminist theory, research methodology, in addition to elective special topics, namely: creative processes in theatre and performance art; the intersectional lens for fostering equity in the curriculum and thinking beyond white feminism, on the inclusion of relevant authors who have remained invisible due to androcentrism and eurocentrism in education.

She earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in English/Theater (MSU, USA, 1987), having developed post-doctoral projects as a Folger Institute Fellow (USA, 1993, 1997, 2003). She was a Global Shakespeare Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK, in 2017. As a director and playwright in Brazil, her main earlier works were Ofélias/A-void-ing, Juliets, and Shadows of Sycorax. These makeovers of Shakespearean characters  discuss experiences of marginalized women and performed in an art gallery, in thirteen different community venues, and in a prison (a forum theater immersion with teenager inmates), respectively. Such site-specific works, forum theater/theater of the oppressed, and outreach workshop projects in community venues since the 1990s earned grants from the Curitiba Cultural Foundation. They also were sponsored by UNICENTRO in the cities of Irati and Guarapuava. Her work-in-process Performing_names evolved during residencies at Artscape Gibraltar Point, Toronto Island, Canada in 2018 and 2019 (there is an entry in the Emergency Index – Vol. 8, Ugly Duckling Presse, New York/USA, 2019, p. 298–299). Since then, she has expanded Performing_names as a video project that addresses intersectional issues, yet to earn funding. Margie’s current work titled “Brazil Commodities 1: coffee”  was performed during the I Arts and Literature Festival of CERLAC (October 24, 2024).

Her publications in Brazil, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany feature scholarship from a post-colonial stance, including the political use of William Shakespeare as a canonical author in Brazil in articles per Oxford, Cahiers Élisabéthains, and Delaware/Fairleigh Dickinson Presses. She served as reviewer and guest-editor of prestigious Brazilian academic journals (Ilha do Desterro – UFSC-Federal Univ. of Santa Catarina; Revista Científica da FAP – UNESPAR (one of the founders);  Urdimento; Education, Arts, and Inclusion – UDESC- State University of Santa Catarina). She recently published, with her co-editor Andréia Schach Fey, an eBook on notable Brazilian women titled  Women in the Arts, Letters, Sciences and Dailies in Paraná (São Paulo: Pimenta Cultural, 2024), available for free download at https://ocul-yor.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01OCUL_YOR/1jocqcq/alma991036925252705164

Margie Rauen’s  website: https://margierauen.com/index.html

For a CV online, access https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0002-2466-339X

A video that features a creative process developed with Margie’s art students and was screened at the 2016 Annual Conference of the American Society for Theatre Research can be watched at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1GyZj7CArI&t=35s

Country or Region of Specialization: Brazil

Keywords: Gender, ethnic-racial categories, intersectional feminism, activisms

Paulo Ravecca researches epistemology and the history of political science; critical theories (queer, neo-marxist, postcolonial, and poststructural approaches); international relations and qualitative methods; and gender and sexuality. He is the author of The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences (2019) and serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Narrative Politics and Crítica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política. Paulo holds a PhD in Political Science from York University.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Latin America, Southern Cone, Chile, Uruguay

Keywords: political science, critical theory, epistemology, qualitative methods, gender and sexuality

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