Fellows

Danielle Robinson is a dance scholar who researches the cross-cultural movement of Afro-Diasporic popular dances within the Americas. Her research has been recognized with awards from the Society of Dance History Scholars, the Congress on Research in Dance, and the American Theatre focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. In addition, during 2011-12, she was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chichester (UK), sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust.

Dr. Robinson’s book manuscript, Modern Moves: Ragtime Dancing and American Cultures (under contract with Oxford University Press), examines how notions of modernity were embodied in early 20th century social dancing and the nascent dance industry that supported it. Her articles on ragtime, jazz and swing dancing in the United States have been published in Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Dance Research Journal (US), Dance Chronicle (US), Dance Research (UK), Research in Dance Education (UK), and the edited collection I See America Dancing (with Juliet McMains). She has recently presented papers at the Congress on Research in Dance, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society of Dance History Scholars and the Symposium on Popular Dance and Music (now known as PoP Moves).

Professor Robinson is currently leading a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project in Bahia, Brazil with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This project explores samba de roda, a dance and music complex with roots in Afro-Brazilian slave cultures, which was recently recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage. The project will culminate in a co-authored book, Roots Sambas: Collaborations and Conflicts in Dancing, Music and Culture, that explores the potential for decolonizing cross-cultural research. Her first article from this research project appears in Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Music and Dance (Ashgate), co-authored with Jeff Packman.

Dr. Robinson taught at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador (Brazil), University of California (Riverside), and University of Texas (Austin) before joining the faculty in York University’s Department of Dance in 2005. She is cross-appointed to the Graduate Programs in Theatre Studies and Communication and Culture and is a Fellow of York’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean and of Winters College. She received the Faculty of Fine Arts Dean’s Teaching Award for junior faculty in 2009.

Antulio Rosales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science, Business and Society program. His research interests coalesce around the areas of international and comparative political economy, natural resource extraction/environmental politics, and global development. Antulio’s research focuses on the politics of state and global capital actors’ interactions in the energy sectors of Latin American countries, especially in Venezuela. His recent work focused on the collapse of Venezuela’s rentier economy and the expansion of new mining frontiers, of both gold and cryptocurrencies. Antulio’s new research agenda is concerned with the expansion of emerging financial assets such as cryptocurrencies and their linkage to energy infrastructures and political incentives in the Global South. 

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Ecuador. 

Keywords: energy, political economy, oil politics, environmental politics, climate change, cryptocurrency, bitcoin, authoritarianism. 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is Special Advisor in the Office of the Dean and Instructor at the Schulich School of Business at York University. He is former Inaugural Technical Advisor in Innovation, Science and Competitiveness to the President of Haiti.

Dr. Rousseau is engaged with traditional questions in the philosophy of science in ways that are resolutely transdisciplinary and overtly post-colonial. He specifically identifies with francophone transatlantic concerns.

His current projects include the problem of demarcation between colonized and colonizer, and the inversion of the logics of discovery and justification to re-establish the primacy of path dependency in the validation of knowledge.

His most recent publication is a co-edited four-volume conference proceedings titled, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, and Image Processing. ICPR 2022 International Workshops and Challenges (Springer, 2023).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Haiti, the Caribbean and its diasporas, the Francophone transatlantic world

Keywords: Inclusive Innovation, Epistemology, Haiti, the Enlightenment

My historical research has focused on various aspects of the relationships among media producers, states, and media audiences in twentieth century Mexico and elsewhere. In undemocratic circumstances, Mexicans formed communities through shared experiences of mass media and popular culture; everyday practices such as movie-going, playing and viewing sports, and even protesting against certain suspect types of media created spaces in which Mexicans could enact their identities as men and women, as family members, as neighbors and as citizens. Most recently my work has taken up questions about the history of gender and sexuality in relation to Mexican mass media and popular culture. My most recent book, co-edited with Víctor M. Macías-González, is Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2012.)

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Mexico,  Guatemala

Keywords: Mass media, popular culture, gender, sexuality, history, twentieth century

Jeannie Samuel is an interdisciplinary scholar with a Ph.D. in Public Health Sciences from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, with expertise in health equity and human rights. She is appointed to the Health and Society program at York University and teaches in the areas of environmental health, health and humanitarianism and gender and health. She has a particular interest in community engaged and hands-on learning practices.

Before pursuing an academic track, Jeannie spent fifteen years working in Canada and the Global South on equity-related social and environmental issues. She held a permanent staff position within the United Nations system, with postings in Africa and Latin America. Jeannie has also worked extensively in Canada on a range of health equity related issues, including community-based health promotion with socially excluded groups in Toronto and youth engaged in environmental justice activism in British Columbia. She is an active Board member for the Ottawa-based international social justice NGO, Inter Pares.

Jeannie is currently pursuing a research agenda focusing on different types of human rights-based accountability mechanisms for addressing health inequities faced by marginalized people.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Latin America, Peru, Canada

Keywords: Health equity, human rights, environmental health, reproductive health, community-engaged learning, hands-on learning.

Dr. Tameka Samuels-Jones is an Assistant Professor in the School of Administrative Studies, LA&PS. She teaches Corporate Social Responsibility & Sustainability with an emphasis on developing country contexts. Her research interests include legal pluralism and environmental regulatory law in the Caribbean and her most recent work examined environmental regulatory compliance among Jamaica’s legally autonomous Maroons. Dr. Samuels-Jones has received numerous awards for her work in this area including the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship award. Dr. Samuels-Jones’ work has been published in various academic journals and presented at international conferences.

Countries or Regions of Specialization: Jamaica, Ecuador

Keywords: Green Criminology, Environmental Sustainability, Regulatory Law in the Caribbean, Legal Pluralism

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

Keywords: International Relations, International Political Economy, Gramscian (International) Political Theory, Peace and Conflict Studies