People

Faculty & Graduate Student Organizers

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  Matilde Córdoba Azcárate

  Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is a social anthropologist interested in questions of space, politics, ecology and global capitalism. I work as an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department and I am an affiliated faculty member at The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS), The Center for U.S-Mexican Studies, The Chicano/a Latino/a Arts and Humanities Program and the International Institute. At UC San Diego. My book Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power and Labor in Contemporay Yucatan (UC Press, Fall 2020) explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck to tourism’s extractive grip. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at beach resorts, protected natural enclaves, historical buildings of the colonial past and maquilas for souvenir production, the book shows how tourism has become one of the leading forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. I am currently working on an edited collection on the Geopolitics of Tourism and interested in the dystopian futures fostered by the expansion of Chinese mega infrastructure projects in rural Latin America. More about me here: https://quote.ucsd.edu/mcazcarate/

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  Elana Zilberg

  Elana Zilberg is Associate Professor in Communication and affiliated faculty with The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies (CILAS), The Center Comparative Immigration Studies, the Department of Ethnic Studies, The Chicano/a Latino/a Arts and Humanities Program and the International Institute. Her book Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Duke 2011) tackled the devastating intersection of U.S. foreign policy and immigration, criminal and anti-terrorist law from the wane of the Cold War to the rise of the War on Terror for Central American (immigrant) youth on the streets of urban barrios in both countries. Her current book manuscript in progress, tentatively entitled “Bridging Divides: Race, Nature and Infrastructure at the Los Angeles River,” examines the contentious spatial and material politics surrounding urban river revitalization. She teaches courses on borders, urban political ecology, built environments and infrastructure, environmental justice, global consumer geographies, ethnographic research methodology and socio-cultural theory. She co-founded and directed the Studio for Ethnographic Design, served as PI for the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design (MRPI), and is incoming co-director of the Human Rights and Migration Program.

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  Johnathon Vargas

  Johnathon Vargas is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Communication, UC San Diego. Their research focuses on borders, spatial and social imaginaries, counter-geographies, social movements, and translation practices.

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  Magdalena Donea

  Magdalena Donea is a Doctoral Candidate in Communication and Science Studies, and Associate Instructor in Thurgood Marshall College's Public Service Minor at UC San Diego. As a former political refugee – as well as a former technology professional and expert in data protection and governance – she combines her doctoral work on the visual culture of trauma and other emotional and embodied states of being of forcibly displaced people with a broader commitment to data justice, in order to formulate questions about how displaced persons are constructed as data subjects, including visually, and about the consequences of such constructions on their lives and prospects. While at UC San Diego, Ms. Donea co-founded the Critical Data Studies Working Group, and currently serves as graduate student co-organizer of the Nature, Space and Politics Working Group. She is also a graduate student member of the Just Transitions Initiative project at UC San Diego's Design Lab. Outside the University, Ms. Donea is a member of the San Diego's Privacy Advisory Board, tasked with ongoing approval and oversight of privacy-impacting technologies in use or proposed by the City of San Diego. She holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies and Textual and Digital Studies from the University of Washington, and an M.A. in Communication from UC San Diego.