Associate Fellows

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

Giselle Thompson is the Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Education at the University of Alberta, where she teaches in the Social Justice and International Studies in Education graduate specialization and the Bachelor of Education program. Her award-winning research exists at the nexus of critical studies in the Sociologies of Race, Education, Gender, Diaspora, and International Development and seeks to understand how colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and modernity operate globally and are implicated in the ongoing (mis)education of Black people. She is particularly concerned with how anti-Black racism in its various iterations including, but not limited to, lack of accessibility, under resourcing, and curricular deficits impede on holistic learning for Black school-aged children and youth and diasporic groups in both local and transnational contexts. Her current research project examines the ways in which the transhistorical phenomenon of Black motherwork is deployed in school settings and in other sites of learning to resist these social maladies, whilst transmitting ethics of love, care, and concern.

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

Alissa Trotz is an Associate Professor in Women and Gender Studies, and Director of the undergraduate Caribbean Studies Program at New College.

Her research interests draw on the Caribbean and its diasporas as a point of departure for exploring the wider resonance of questions that emerge from the incredibly complex site of colonial encounter that comprises this region.

She also edits a weekly column, In the Diaspora, in a Guyanese daily The Stabroek News.

Alissa Trotz is currently working on two projects: Violence and security in the contemporary Caribbean; and a SSHRC-funded grant on history, memory and violence in colonial Guyana. Her essays have appeared in a number of journals, on such topics as transnational feminism and the Caribbean (Caribbean Review of Gender Studies), Caribbean migration and diaspora (Global Networks; Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism); historicizing the Caribbean family (Social and Economic Studies; New West Indian Guide); gender, coloniality and violence (Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism) and the gendered politics of neoliberalism, social reproduction and women’s activism (Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies). She guest-edited, with Aaron Kamugisha, a special issue of Race and Class to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade (2007); with Kate Quinn, a special issue of Macomѐre on women and national political struggles in the Caribbean (Fall 2010) and is currently editing, with Deborah Thomas, a special issue of Social and Economic Studies on feminist epistemologies of violence in the Caribbean. She is a member of Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: The Caribbean

Keywords: Diaspora and Transnational Migration, Gender and Political Economy, Social Movements, Transnational feminism, Violence and Memory

My research interests are:

• Latin America, neoliberalism, racism.
• Sociology of development, sociology of fear, political sociology.

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

Keywords: Neoliberalism, racism

Dot Tuer is a writer, curator, and cultural historian. Her research addresses postcolonial perspectives in Latin American and Canadian art, with a focus on performance, photography, and new media. She also has a research interest in the colonial history of Indigenous-European relations and transcultural exchange in the Paraná River and Great Lakes regions. Tuer is the author of Mining the Media Archive (2005) and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and museum catalogues. Her most recent curatorial project, Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting, was a retrospective exhibition of the Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012-13.

Tuer is currently a co-Investigator on a major SSHRC partnership grant, the Canadian Consortium for Performance and Politics in the Americas (2013-2020), which is dedicated to fostering hemispheric networks for Canadian artists and researchers in collaboration with the New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Writing projects in progress include a monograph on the politics of cultural memory and visual storytelling in Canadian art; and a collaborative book on witnessing, photography, and Spaces of Memory in Argentina. A selection of past publications is posted at http://ocad.academia.edu/DotTuer

Tuer has received numerous awards for her work on art and culture, including the Toronto Arts Award, National Magazine Award, Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, and OCAD University’s Award for Distinguished Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity. In the public sphere, she has served as a board member for the Power Plant, the Toronto Arts Council, the Cinemateque Ontario, the Funnel Film Theatre, Fuse and C magazines; and as an advisory board member for LACAP, Prefix and Public. She has served as a juror for all levels of government cultural funding, and for international festivals and museums. She has held various administrative positions at OCAD University, including Acting Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Chair of Curatorial and Criticism Practice, and Chair of Visual and Critical Studies.

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

Keywords: diasporic perspectives in Latin American and Canadian art, cultural memory, state violence, decolonial and postcolonial theory, performance studies

Paloma E. Villegas is a Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.  Her research focuses on the intersections between migrant illegalization, race and gender.  She is currently working on a book manuscript on the experiences of precarious status Mexican migrants in Toronto.  She is also working on a research project that examines access to postsecondary schooling for precarious status students.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Mexico, Transnational Latinx migration to the U.S. and Canada

Keywords: Migration, illegalization, racialization, gender, schooling, transnationalism