2026 CALACS Best Book Award
Jacob Blanc is associate professor of history and international development studies at McGill University.
Dr. Blanc is the author of five books and edited volumes, and has received major fellowships and grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities (in the US), and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (in the UK). He did his doctoral studies at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, and prior to McGill, he taught at the University of Edinburgh. He has a background as a journalist and also contributed to truth commission reports in Brazil and Colombia. Having so far worked primarily on Latin American history, he is now writing a global history of the phrase "never again."
This biography of Brazilian journalist and activist Aluízio Palmar (b. 1943) tells the remarkable story of a revolutionary who, after surviving torture as a political prisoner during his country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, would devote the second half of his life to investigating human rights abuses. With an eye to the intricacies of how Palmar has narrated his life across interviews, writings, and public engagement, Blanc offers an innovative window into how former activists view their place in history.
Searching for Memory is a singular contribution to literature on dictatorship, memory, and oral history. It does more than just recount Palmar’s life story. It is also a story about stories: how Palmar has told his own life history, why he has transformed his most traumatic memories into a public narrative, and the meanings of memory in the shadow of dictatorship.
Published by The University of North Carolina Press
2026 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award
Postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Etnografía at El Colegio de México.
Dr. Meléndez Guerrero focuses on the intersections of materiality, territory, and power. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Western University as a Vanier Scholar supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Drawing on ethnographic research, his doctoral dissertation examines how local miners in the Peruvian Andes sustain their ‘informalized’ livelihoods within a legal regime that recognizes their ownership of the surface land while granting transnational companies the right to exploit the minerals beneath their village. His doctoral research has received distinctions from the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (SLACA) of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Findings from his dissertation have been published in leading journals, including The Extractive Industries and Society and Resources Policy, as well as in outreach media such as Anthropology News. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratorio Interdisciplinario de Etnografía at El Colegio de México, where he is developing a book manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation.
Since the first half of the 2000s, residents of Algamarca—a rural village located in the northern Peruvian Andes—have been informally extracting minerals within the concession of a foreign mining company. This dissertation examines the political work of this group of artisanal miners to secure and sustain their livelihoods in a context marked by state initiatives aimed at regulating their informal activities. Based on eleven months of ethnographic research, it unpacks four key sociopolitical arrangements that have allowed them to prolong their activity over time. First, the dissertation examines their local donations as forms of social responsivity that, unlike the corporate social responsibility of industrial mining, are more pragmatic, meaningful and adaptable to the vulnerable contexts from which they emerge. Second, it shows how the mining network becomes embedded in local power structures by forming a subterranean state, which refers to actors and institutions that, while publicly operating under a state-like guise, critically depend on revenues from informal mining to fulfill their functions. Third, it reveals the constitution of frontier companies: local mining ventures that partially reproduce organizational structures, symbols, and techniques associated with corporate mining, while coexisting with informal and legally ambiguous practices. Finally, the research analyzes the in-depth arrangements between artisanal miners and state authorities, which are extraofficial agreements that seek to refashion state formalization design by incorporating a vertical and tridimensional orientation for the governance of underground space. These arrangements allow us to understand the political work of artisanal miners as an assemblage practice that articulates different projects, organizational forms, normative regimes, and, crucially, the materiality of the mineral resource they extract. By making these assemblages visible, the dissertation reveals a ‘people’s extractivism’ that enriches and complicates conventional interpretations of artisanal and small-scale mining. In doing so, it broadens our understanding of artisanal miners’ politics by situating them beyond their usual portrayal as anti-state and disruptive actors; it reimagines artisanal mining not merely only as an extracting and predatory activity, but also as an authentic giving force; and it illuminates the constitutive role of resource materiality in mining arrangements and in the possibilities of formalization.
2026 CALACS Article Prize for Emerging Scholars
Dr. Natalia Landívar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Justice First project at the University of Calgary, where her research examines community-led, feminist approaches to energy and food transitions. She previously served as a Sessional Instructor in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. She holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resources Management from the University of Manitoba, a Master's degree in Territorial Rural Development from FLACSO-Ecuador, and a B.A. in Economics from Heidelberg University, Germany. Her work bridges academic research and grassroots activism, drawing on decades of engagement with peasant organizations in her native Ecuador and around the world, as well as participation in international civil society initiatives on food sovereignty and rural development. Her research lies at the intersection of critical agrarian studies, feminist political ecology, and Indigenous and peasant food and energy systems.
Dr. Lynne Phillips is a retired Professor of Anthropology. Her research focuses on gender, rural livelihoods, development, political economy, and feminist and postcolonial methodologies in Latin America. She has conducted research in Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, with projects supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). As a postdoctoral researcher, she contributed to Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León's landmark book, Rural Women and State Policy: Feminist Perspectives on Latin American Agricultural Development (1987), through ethnographic research on rural women in Ecuador's Los Ríos Province. She is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including The Third Wave of Modernization in Latin America, Contesting Publics: Feminism, Activism, Ethnography, and Ethnographic Feminisms: Essays in Anthropology.
This article examines how campesinas in coastal Ecuador have navigated shifting labour roles, financial precarity and ecological degradation under Plan Tierras, a state-led land redistribution policy embedded in an extractivist model of agriculture. While Plan Tierrasformally recognized women as land beneficiaries, we argue that it intensified women's burdens across blurred boundaries between productive, reproductive and ecological spaces. Building on feminist political ecology and recent debates on the labours of social reproduction, we conceptualize agrarian extractivism as a process that simultaneously depletes women's bodies, emotions and the ecological foundations of life. Drawing on ethnographic research in Hacienda Las Mercedes, we show how women's everyday practices reveal the convergence of production, reproductive and ecological labour within circuits of extraction that sustain agrarian capitalism. This framework highlights the contradictions of state-led reforms that rely on women's unpaid and affective work while undermining the material and ecological conditions that sustain it. Yet, women also resist extractivist pressure through grounded, care-centred practices that sustain livelihoods and reassert campesina identities. By revisiting the foundational work of Carmen Diana Deere, this article offers a critical feminist lens on agrarian reform, calling for a transition from inclusion-based policies to reproductive and ecological justice.
2026 CALACS Graduate Essay Prize
2025 CALACS Best Book Award
Roberta Rice is Professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Calgary, Canada. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in environmental studies at York University and her PhD in Political Science at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Doing Democracy Differently: Indigenous Rights and Representation in Canada and Latin America (University of Calgary Press, 2024), which won the 2025 Best Book Award prize from the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS). She is also the author of The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era (University of Arizona Press, 2012) as well as the co-editor of Protest and Democracy (University of Calgary Press, 2019) and Re-Imagining Community and Civil Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (Routledge, 2016). She is currently working on a research project on Indigenous and environmental activism in response to extractive industry in Bolivia, Ecuador, and the Philippines that has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Across North and South America, Indigenous people play a dual political role, building self-governing structures in their own nations and participating in the elections of settler states. Doing Democracy Differently asks how states are responding to demands for Indigenous representation and autonomy and in what ways the ongoing project of decolonization may unsettle the practice of democracy. Based on the structured, focused comparison of four success stories across Northern Canada, Bolivia, and Ecuador, this book provides real-world examples of how Indigenous autonomy and self-determination may be successfully advanced using existing democratic mechanisms. Drawing on thorough original research to identify factors that create distinctive patterns within Indigenous-state relations, it argues that the capacity for democratic innovation lies within the realm of civil society while the possibility for uptake of such innovation is found within the state and its willingness to work with Indigenous and popular actors. Operating at the intersection of Indigenous and Comparative Politics, Doing Democracy Differently takes seriously the role of institutions and the land on which they are built in the creation of democratic transformations in the Americas. This book advances Indigenous rights to autonomy and self-government and speaks to some of the thorniest issues in democratic governance.
2025 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award
John P. Hayes is a Political Scientist researching community-state-industry relationships. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. He holds a PhD in Political Science from McMaster University. He also holds a M.A. in Political Science from York University and a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Latin American Studies, with a certificate in Mexican Social Movements from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Xochimilco, Ciudad de México. Broadly, his research examines natural resource governance at several policy intersections. He applies theories of the policy process and political ecology to resource conflicts. His cases primarily pertain to Mexican resource communities and national policy issues. John is particularly interested in the policy implications of his research. He has published policy reports on the status of Mexican resource governance as it relates to strategic minerals used in battery metals and has contributed to a study on the interactions of oil and conservation in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park. His research has been supported by Global Affairs Canada, the International Development Research Centre, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Between 1988-2018, Mexico’s mining sector underwent a structural transition, which entailed a change from a joint-ownership model between the national government and domestic industry to a completely privatized model led by foreign exploration companies. In this process, mining production rose significantly, which happened in tandem with a legislative and regulatory overhaul of the major policy domains of natural resource governance (NRG), understood as land tenure, environmental policy, labour policy, and the regulation of capital. Despite the shift towards new institutions and the increasing influence of foreign capital and global mining companies, not all of these policy domains were successfully reformed to align with the new neoliberal-oriented NRG, which has led to conflicting regulatory and legislative formations that fuel social-environmental conflict. Of the four main policy areas that comprise NRG, there is unevenness in the extent to which they were reformed, despite their equal importance to determining distributions of power between stakeholders, and the relative influence of private, public, or community authority. Drawing on a combination of Historical Institutionalism (HI) and Political Ecology (PE), this dissertation explains why there is divergence in the policy changes and how they are explained by shifts in the influence of stakeholders as the sector began to dominate the countryside and create historically high profits in the country. The study finds that, despite widely accepted narratives about policy change in Mexico during democratic opening and the global diffusion of neoliberal economic policies, there are important institutional and policy legacies rooted in certain veto players that constrained policy reforms in some policy domains while creating pathways of reform in others. The unevenness in reforms, contradictory legislation, and vagueness of certain laws have all contributed to the current NRG paradigm and Mexico’s status as hosting the highest number of mining-related social-environmental conflicts in the Americas. The dissertation also introduces and applies a unique analytical framework for tracing policy change across time, which joins existing comparative public policy scholarship that examines several different policy areas at once. My study qualifies insights from HI and PE by tracing the discrete policy events and wider shifts in stakeholder power and influence in the processes of shifting the mining sector from import-substitution models of production to neoliberalism.
2025 CALACS Article Prize for Emerging Scholars
Natalia Landivar is a racialized migrant woman, born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and residing in Canada since 2016, where she arrived to pursue a Ph.D. in Natural Resources Management at the University of Manitoba. During her studies in Economics at Heidelberg University in Germany, she collaborated for five years as an intern and volunteer with Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN International), an organization committed to the realization of the right to food worldwide. In 2006, she founded FIAN Ecuador, where she served for ten years working with peasant and small-scale food producer’s organizations, as well as with regional and international networks, in their struggles for human rights related to land and food sovereignty. In 2011, she was appointed as a representative of Global South NGOs on the first Coordinating Committee of the Civil Society Mechanism, established after the reform of the UN Committee on World Food Security. As a result of this work, she was invited to join the board of SeedChange, a Canadian non-governmental organization supporting biodiversity, resilient food systems, and the rights of small-scale farmers in Canada and the Global South—a position she held from 2014 to 2020. Her doctoral research built on her Master in Territorial Rural Development at FLACSO-Ecuador and drew from over ten years of sustained activism with peasant associations in their struggles for land rights in her home region. Since 2019, she has also been a member of the Permanent Committee for Human Rights (CDH), a non-governmental organization based in Guayaquil that supports low-income individuals facing human rights violations. Recently, Natalia began a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta, where she supports processes for energy transition and the development of fair and equitable agri-food systems. She is currently also working as an assistant instructor in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the same university.
This article analyzes the barriers that peasant associations faced to access seized land in Hacienda Las Mercedes through the Plan Tierras. I argue that the mobilization for land transited between an undemocratic state that has historically served the agrarian elite and a state impregnated by patronage, corruption and violent practices that wrested autonomy from and divided peasant organizations to prevent the effective distribution of seized hacienda land. Persistent peasant mobilization illustrates how the struggle for land was also a struggle against a state apparatus that continued to serve the interests of the agrarian elite eager to recover its former properties.
2025 CALACS Graduate Essay Prize
Alonso is a graduate student in the History department at Concordia University in Montreal. His research focuses on the early republican and pre-Porfirian periods of Mexican cultural, political, and social history. Alonso previously graduated from Concordia with Distinction, earning a B.A. with Honours in History, and has received several awards, including the David Fox Prize, a Concordia Merit Scholarship, and fellowships from the Gilder Lehrman American History Institute and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, he has obtained research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds de Recherche du Québec. His current research projects explore themes of gender and race during the establishment of a national legal state apparatus in the decentralized rural areas of mid-19th-century Mexico. Alongside his research on Mexican history, Alonso has held positions at various public history institutions, including the Canadian Museum of Immigration and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.
The article presents a comparative analysis of the Mexican and American borderlands survey reports undertaken in 1828 in the Diario de viaje de la comisión de límites and 1857 in the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey Report. The comparison of these two reports highlights the racial commentary made by the explorers after their encounters with various Indigenous populations in the borderland region. Through a comparative framework, Rangel contends that these colonial projects in the borderlands addressed questions of racial identity among these Indigenous groups in diverging ways, which in turn had disparate consequences for the racialized subjects. The Mexican expeditions scrutinized the racial differences of these populations based on class and cultural notions, which subsequently facilitated their forced assimilation and incorporation into the nation. Conversely, the Americans viewed these racial differences as fundamentally biological—a perspective that prompted their expedition to call for the extermination of the Indigenous inhabitants of the frontier.
CALACS Best Book Award 2022
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.
2023 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award
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.