Research Associates

My master’s research is focused on public space and understanding how tourism development as neoliberal project in Caribbean SIDS organizes space along highly prized coastal edges.

Countries or Regions of Specialization: The Bahamas, the Caribbean.

Keywords: Public Space Planning, Tourism, Caribbean SIDS, Placemaking, and Neoliberalism

Sharifa Riley is an Arts and Heritage specialist who has been working in the art gallery and museum field for the last eight years in a variety of positions. Beginning her career in developing educational programming for youth, children and families, Sharifa Riley has expanded her experience in the field by taking on Curatorial projects and Collections Management initiatives. Her current exhibition, A Woman’s Work is Never Done, 125 Years of Serving their Communities, is currently exhibited at the Erland Lee (Museum) Home.

Sharifa Riley’s passion for art and history has allowed her to broaden the minds of all those she comes in contact with. She is determined and creative, and is looking forward to many years of helping people discover what their community has to offer.

Sharifa is a graduate from the University of Ottawa (B.A.), Sir Sandford Fleming College (Post Graduate) and is currently working on her M.A. in Art History, with a focus on Trinidadian Women Artists, at York University.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Trinidad and Tobago

Keywords: Art, history, curatorial, women

Rosario del Pilar Rodríguez Romani is a Master’s candidate in Geography at the University of York and an activist for body diversity in Lima-Peru, her city of origin. She also has a degree in Anthropology and studies in gender issues.

Her research topic concerns the colonialist background of fatphobic and aesthetically violent discourses and their diffusion and impact among Peruvian women, especially of Andean and Amazonian ethnicities and roots.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Peru, South America, South Andean-Amazonian

Keywords: Colonialism, fat studies, aesthetic violence, digital activism, Latinx feminist theories, culture, decolonial geographies.

Kanishka Sikri (kanishkasikri.com) is a writer and theorist thinking about violability: the practice that marks certain lives, bodies, and lands to the possibility of violence. They are currently a PhD candidate at York University speculating on the ways violence becomes synonymous with and inhabits the flesh. Kanishka asks how we may speak about violence, lay it bare, grieve and mourn its many insidious faces without replicating the notion that certain lives are violable and capable of being violated.

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

Keywords: violability, violence

TAMARA TOLEDO is a Chilean-born Toronto-based PhD Art History and Visual Culture candidate at York University as well as a scholar, curator, and artist. Toledo is co-founder of the Allende Arts Festival and of Latin American Canadian Art Projects – LACAP. For over a decade, she has curated numerous exhibitions offering spaces and opportunities to artists of Latin American descent to showcase their work. She designed and has been curating the Latin American Speakers Series for which she has invited internationally renowned contemporary artists and curators to Toronto to articulate and discuss issues of identity and intercultural dynamics in contemporary art. Toledo has presented her work at various conferences in Montreal, New York, Vancouver, Chicago, and Toronto. Her writing has appeared in ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture Journal.  Her practice follows an interdisciplinary approach and touches on notions of memory, identity, diasporas, transnationalism, issues of power, representation, and international artistic-cultural interaction. Toledo is presently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery, the only space dedicated to contemporary Latin American art in Canada.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Chile

Keywords: memory, identity, diasporas, transnationalism, issues of power, representation, and international artistic-cultural interaction

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the department of anthropology. On a very broad level, I am interested in the way in which art murals and graffiti, are imbricated in a broader reconfiguration of the meaning of the past, present, and future. I situate the experience of Salvadorans within the longer history of conflict in El Salvador (Bourgois 2001; Ching 2016; Binford, 1997, 2002) and draw on literature in the anthropology of subjectivity.

In pursuing a Ph.D., I would like to address the key role of everyday politics in the contestation and articulation of space, memory, and futurities. The questions I am currently grappling with include: 1) how is historical memory contested through different modes of public visual art?; 2) how do grafiteros assert or challenge narratives of post-war recovery through the use of graffiti?; and 3) in what ways does the narrative of recovery lend itself to the transformation of the streets from a space of uncertainty and violence to one of hope and futurities?

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: El Salvador

Keywords: Materiality of space; architectural and geographical landscapes; affect; political violence; graffiti and art murals in El Salvador and Latin America; time; and memory.

Lorenzo Vargas is a communication for development specialist, a communication rights activist, and a researcher on citizens’ media. He is pursuing a PhD in Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) / York University, where he is affiliated with the Global Communication Governance Lab (TMU) and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (York). His research focuses on the relationship between communication rights and climate justice among rural communities in the Amazon regions of Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. Outside his academic life, Lorenzo works with WACC, an international civil society organization focused on communication rights, where he directs a global initiative that support grassroots sustainable development efforts in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. He holds degrees in international development and communication from York University and McGill University, and has also pursued studies on media and Internet policy at DiploFoundation, the University of Brasilia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and the University of Oxford. His publications include Citizen’s Media as a Tool for the Local Construction of Peace in Colombia (2013); Indigenous Community Media Aid Reconciliation in Canada (2015); Expanding Shrinking Communication Spaces (ed. with Philip Lee) (2020); and Communicating Climate Justice (ed. with Philip Lee)  (2022).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador

Keywords: Communication rights, climate justice, activism, media