CALACS Best Book Award 2022

2023 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award

Andrea A. Davis is Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas in the Department of Humanities at York University and co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies. A champion of Black Studies in the humanities and former Canadian Commonwealth scholar, her interdisciplinary research is rooted in an anti-racism feminist framework that analyzes questions of race and gender through a focus on the literary and cultural productions of Black women, constructions of Black youth masculinities, and Black and Indigenous solidarities. As Academic Convenor of the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, she led a transformative vision of interdisciplinary research grounded in Indigenous and Black Thought and environmental justice. Previously, as interim director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) in 2012-2013, her SSHRC-funded research on the effects of violence on Black youth in Canada and Jamaica was profiled in the Council of Ontario Universities' Research Matters campaign. A passionate advocate for students, Davis is also an accomplished teacher who has won teaching awards at the faculty, university and national levels, including a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship. In November 2023, she received an Honorary Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) from Royal Roads University in recognition of her contributions to Black Studies. She is the lead editor of The Routledge Handbook to Black Canadian Literature (forthcoming in fall 2024), and her next book project is a creative nonfiction exploration of women’s nineteenth and twentieth-century journeys across the Atlantic Ocean and Sargasso Sea.
Dr. Davis proposes insightful reflections on the place of reintegrated histories as places of resistance and solidarity in the face of exploitation and dispossession in Canada and in the Americas more broadly.
The critique of Canadian multiculturalism that Davis proposes enables the formulation of theoretical tools of solidarity to resist the hegemonic violence of the nation-state. Davis demands that stories of African and Caribbean subjects be revealed beyond national or regional borders. They must be integrated, weaved into a historical and contemporary narrative of the Americas, one able to cast the plurality of their shared experiences of land and sea.
The contribution of the book invites us to challenge the nation-state category of analysis as inadequate. By integrating the history of Caribbean women into shared narratives of anti-capitalist resistance, Davis shatters regional categories themselves. In many ways, her book suggests that it’s impossible to think about either the Canadian past or future without integrating the past and future of Caribbean, African and Indian subjects.
The prose is clear and fluid. The arguments are organized in an impeccable structure. Sources are varied and used in the study with both analytical rigor and intellectual creativity. A superb endeavor that deserves to be celebrated and recognized by peers in the Americas and the Caribbeans.
Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University (Sweden). Previously, she was a Vinnova/Marie Curie/SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Lund University’s Department of Political Science (Sweden), and she completed her Ph.D. with excellence at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada, 2022) in Political Science and Feminist Studies. Her work focuses on women’s political militancy in leftist insurgencies and post-war settings, which has been published in journals such as Security Dialogue, Journal of Gender Studies, Conflict, Security & Development, among others.
Priscyll is also actively involved in the activities of the Fundación Lüvo collective (Colombia, Canada), which is committed to the formulation of feminist and anti-racist projects and the publication of the Revista Lüvo. She has more than 10 years of experience in research and gender consultancy with NGOs, civil society organizations, universities, and feminist and women’s collectives.
Dr. Priscyll Anctil Avoine’s exceptional dissertation examines former women combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) and their experiences of reincorporation into civilian life through a Feminist Security Studies theoretical framework that analyzes the place of the body in armed conflict as well as the role of women in insurgent groups and post-peace agreement scenarios. Dr. Anctil Avoine’s dissertation is impressive in its ambition and scope. It engages thoroughly with the feminist literature in peace and conflict studies to examine the disarmament of "farianas" (former female FARC combatants) after the signing of the peace accords in Colombia.
Employing a feminist methodological approach including several novel data collection techniques, the author shows the various ways in which the reincorporation into civilian society occurs through embodied and emotional ruptures. As such, the thesis makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature. It brings a feminist perspective to the study of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) processes and it points to possible theoretical and empirical paths for an embodied-affective and militant approach to study reincorporation.
CALACS 2023 ARTICLE PRIZE FOR EMERGING SCHOLARS

Before joining KPU's Sociology Department in the Fall of 2021, Fabricio served as a sociology instructor at the Federal Fluminense University in Brazil. He completed his Master of Arts and PhD in Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University in Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), Brazil, where he joined the Centre for Research, Documentation and Reference on Social Movements and Public Policies in the Countryside (NMSPP/CPDA/UFRRJ).
As an awardee of the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program, Fabricio went to the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2018 for a PhD exchange program that focused on transitional justice. Following his passion for public scholarship, Fabricio has been contributing to Brazil's Peasant Truth Commission, raising public awareness on the history of the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964-1985 and advocating for agrarian reform and reparation to victims of violence in rural Brazil.
This article sheds light on the important and underexplored relationship between militants and peasants during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) by looking at the attempts of ‘8 October Revolutionary Movement’ to mobilize peasants to join the armed struggle. Relying on original research, including interviews with former militants and document analysis, it advances theoretical debates on the role of the peasantry in revolutionary projects. Drawing on Freire’s theory of liberatory education which places communication with the masses at the centre of political mobilization and revolutionary action, Teló offers a rich and fascinating account of the communication process between ‘8 October Revolutionary Movement’ and peasants in the hinterland of the state of Bahia.
The author skillfully illuminates on the complex interplay of factors that shape the conditions under which some peasants become political subjects and others choose not to engage. The study also reveals the importance of anti-communist propaganda, the infiltration of the peasantry by the military intelligence services, and the use of some peasants as informants, in explaining non-engagement. At the same, the article offers a novel way of assessing the outcomes of political mobilization. Instead of categorizing the revolutionary movement as simply successful or unsuccessful, it invites us to consider some of the indirect or unintended positive consequences such as the establishment of social rights for rural workers as part of a broader rural social welfare approach adopted by the dictatorship with the aim of preventing social revolts promoted by revolutionary movements.
CALACS 2023 Graduate Essay Prize

Laura is a doctoral candidate for the PhD in Political Science and the PhD Specialization in Political Economy at Carleton University. Her research interests include indigenous rights movements in Latin America, development studies, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Her current project examines the socio-legal strategies of various Mayan groups in the South of Mexico in the context of the mega tourism project, the Mayan train. Laura holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Development Studies from McGill University and a Master’s degree in Development Studies from York University, in addition to graduate diplomas from the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) based at York University. Aside from her academic work, Laura has been working with human rights and civil society organizations since 2015, including the Pueblos Étnicos y Paz – Red Global/Ethnic Peoples and Peace – Global Network, the Americas Policy Group (APG) and the Colombian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Ontario. Laura received several prizes and recognitions for her research, including the Carl Jacobsen Peace Prize (2022), the Word Warrior Society Bursary Award (2023) and the Kanta Marwah Research Grant (2023).
In this paper, Laura Primeau traces how indigenous communities navigate international human rights norms as part of territorial struggles. The author offers a nuanced account of how indigenous groups accept certain elements of national and international legal governance while rejecting others, creating new strategies to challenge the silencing of alternative ways of being and knowing. This highly original paper is well researched and clearly argued. It makes a valuable contribution on a timely issue that is prevalent across the Global South – environmental social conflicts generated by neoliberal megaprojects – by capturing the limitations inherent in Western notions of human rights for communities in resistance.