Frida Camille Melgar is a first-year student in the Latin American Studies MA program. She is from El Paso, Texas, and has a BA in Global Studies, with a minor in International Business from St. Edward‘€™s University. Frida is a Fulbright Scholar who participated in the 2019 Binational Business Program in Mexico City. There she worked with the NGO Ashoka, helping social entrepreneurs in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Her academic interests include international development, immigration studies, and human rights. Frida is fluent in English, Spanish and is also learning Portuguese. She hopes to travel to Brazil and continue to improve her language skills.

Originally from Quito, Ecuador, Martín Mejía is currently a Ph.D. Student in the Latin American Studies program. He received his BA in Political Science at Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He also attained a Master of Arts in Political Theory at University of Essex in England, United Kingdom. Most recently, he worked as a political advisor at the Buenos Aires city legislature and has additionally served as a campaign advisor for a city deputy. Since his undergraduate preparation, Martín has been researching populism, democracy and religion in Latin America. As a result, he has published articles related to populism, religion, International Political economy, democracy and democratization. In addition to his studies, Martín has participated in multiple conferences of Latin American Politics and holds a graduate certificate in Political Communication by the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. At the Stone Center, he continues to research populism, democracy and religion in South America.

Amy Medvick holds a BA in Jazz Performance awarded jointly by Humber College and Thompson Rivers University, and an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto, Canada. Her Master’s thesis, entitled “Testing the Boundaries of ‘Women’s Music’: Grupos Femininos in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil,” examines how gender, race, and class are conceptualized at the boundaries of musical groups formed of only or predominantly women. She has performed extensively as a vocalist, flautist, and percussionist in many of Toronto’s Brazilian music acts. Her PhD research will continue her examination of issues of gender, race, and class in musical practice, focusing on the roles of women and gender politics in the Afro-Brazilian drumming tradition of maracatu-nação.

Valerie McGinley has been with the Stone Center since 1995. Her responsibilities include managing the administrative and operational support for all aspects of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies including program planning, budgeting, human resources, space management, and other operations, in addition to overseeing grants, sponsored projects, their fiscal management and compliance, supervising public relations, media initiatives, and the international programs of the Stone Center. Previous to her current position she coordinated educational outreach activities through the Latin American Resource Center. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and a M.Ed. in Second Language Instruction, both from Tulane University, and taught high school Spanish and adult ESL in the metro-New Orleans area.

Erin L. McCutcheon earned her Ph.D. in the joint Latin American Studies and Art History program in May 2021. Her expertise lies in modern and contemporary Latin American art and history, global twentieth century feminist art and feminist theories, postcolonial and gender studies, and social movements in Latin America. She received her B.A. from Boston College in 2005, with a dual major in Art History and English Literature and a minor in Studio Art. From 2006-2009 Erin worked as the Curatorial Department Assistant for the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She earned her M.A. in History of Art and Feminist Theory in 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Griselda Pollock at the University of Leeds. Since arriving at Tulane, Erin has taught for both the Latin American Studies and Art History Departments, as well as founded the Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Graduate Colloquium, Food for Thought. Her Ph.D. research centered on women artists involved in feminism in post-1968 Mexico City. In relation to this topic, Erin conducted an oral history project with key feminist artists in Mexico, for which she was awarded research grants from the Reed Foundation, Organization for Research on Women and Communications and School of Liberal Arts at Tulane. Erin also assisted in planning the first retrospective of the works of feminist artist Mónica Mayer, held in 2016 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

I am driven to understand how and why people work with media and through media and communications industries. This research agenda ranges from questioning the micro-dynamics of media production—who are media producers, how do culture, identity, and community influence their work—to the political economies of communications industries and infrastructures support or deter media production. All of this research has been place-based, generally using ethnographic or human-subjects’ insights in addition to other archival, quantitative, or textual analyses. While I do not consider myself a Brazilianist or a regional specialist, I find that case studies in Latin America or Latino America provide important counter-examples to the normative assumptions found in dominant communication and media discourses and theories.

I began doing fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the 1990s with grassroots video producers working to achieve social goals through media production. From there, I became a participant in Mexican-American community media in San Antonio, Texas, using many of the techniques and methods used in Brazilian communities. My action research agenda was to continually improve the community media project while, at the same time, I was studying Mexican Americans as media producers and consumers. That work became a dissertation on how different generations of Mexican Americans used media to express differing notions of cultural citizenship.

That work also led to a research subdiscipline in media studies known as ‘production studies.’ That subdiscipline focuses on the cultural aspects of different job roles and work in media industries, how the structures of work produces the normative labor force in terms of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and class. My first and second books theorize identity and media labor grounded in my fieldwork in San Antonio, Texas; Davis, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Manaus, Amazonia.

In the newest chapter of this trajectory to understand media production and communications industries, I have working on new field projects to illuminate the ways that the largest media and communications industries in the world use public monies to control and manage labor and production cultures. Although this work has not advanced in Latin America yet, I hope to do fieldwork there again soon.

Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research is on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Among her recent publications, the Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

The Commitment to Equity handbook (2nd edition), edited by our own Nora Lustig, has just been published. It is a unique manual on the theory and practical methods for determining the impact of taxation and public spending on inequality and poverty. In Volume 1 - Fiscal Incidence Analysis: Methodology, Implementation, and Applications, policymakers, social planners, and economists are provided with a step-by-step guide to applying fiscal incidence analysis illustrated by country studies as well as the required software and a comprehensive set of key indicators and data housed in the CEQ Data Center on Fiscal Redistribution. Volume 2 - Methodological Frontiers in Fiscal Incidence Analysis includes a collection of chapters on alternative approaches to value in-kind education and health services; alternative methods to evaluate spending on infrastructure; corporate taxes and taxation on capital incomes; the redistributive consequences of social insurance pensions; the sustainability of fiscal redistribution; and, political economy of redistributive fiscal policy.