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.

My academic trajectory has taken me in two very different directions, starting with my graduate work in the Cultural Anthropology department at Harvard and culminating in my current role as Director of the Portuguese Language Program here at Tulane. I like to think of myself as a social anthropologist who specializes in teaching Portuguese language and as someone who has long encouraged colleagues across disciplines to acknowledge the importance of teaching culture in the language classroom as well as the importance of teaching language to students and scholars of culture.

My research in the ethnomusicology realm focuses on music and dance from the Northeast of Brazil as well as regional/national migrations and the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition in Brazilian popular music. I’ve studied the button accordion with world-renowned musician Arlindo dos Oito Baixos, an experience out of which grew the ethnographic research for my dissertation. That project explores forró music in the cities of Recife, Rio de Janeiro and New York to show mutations in popular music production and consumption across time and space. I examine Luiz Gonzaga as the creator and disseminator of forró at its most “traditional” and iconic and the discourse of forró as a “roots” genre. I then look at more recent permutations—namely forró estilizado and forró universitário—to determine how the roots discourse has remained a constant even while the music production itself has changed. My understanding of the genre comes not just from its change over the years, but also across different nodes in Brazilian migrations, from the rural to urban migrations of the mid-twentieth century to the north-south migrations of the age of industrialization and finally international migrations as a result of Brazilian financial crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Ultimately I propose that Brazilians have approached the age of globalism with gusto while still reveling in the memory, many times never actually experienced, of a traditional rural upbringing in simpler more rustic times. It is this imagined “forróscape” that I argue accounts for the great surge in popularity of forró on stages across Brazil and the world from the turn of the 21st century.

Prior to my work on Brazilian music, I lived in Salvador da Bahia, where I researched the afro-Brazilian religion of candomblé and wrote the first English-language work on the culto dos eguns, an ancestor-worship cult within the larger religious complex of candomblé. Though candomblé is well known to be a matrilinear religion (and the city of Salvador a “city of women”), the culto dos eguns is markedly male-centered and my work examined the interplay of these two gendered philosophies and how they converge within practitioner communities in the city and its satellite areas. I also focused my research on the introduction of modern pop culture phenomena into what was defined as a highly traditional and “pure” religious heritage.

I discovered, even while working in the field of anthropology, that the language classroom is in fact an arena in which we can not only describe and analyze culture but actually perform culture and teach it through example, thus beginning my transition to Second Language Acquisition and Portuguese as a foreign language. I taught at Princeton University for over ten years before I came to Tulane, all the while developing materials meant to take advantage of new media and expanding a music-based curriculum that incorporates Brazilian popular music into every class in order to analyze and discuss key vocabulary and grammar from each unit. A major contribution I’ve brought to my work is the importance of developing an on-campus community that offers extensive extra-curricular opportunities to use language in context, and I’ve founded groups built around conversation, music, board games and more as a way to draw students out of the classroom and into the community.

Today our Portuguese language curriculum is a vibrant space that emphasizes music, popular culture, new media as well as innovative technologies inside and outside the classroom. One of the special programs that we have spearheaded here at Tulane are weekly telecollaboration sessions that happen in real time between our intro and intermediate students and partners from the State University of São Paulo. Other current projects include community-based learning activities, ludic learning in the language classroom, development of strategic competence, proficiency-oriented program materials, literacy in L2/L3, and incorporation of African and Asian linguistic and cultural content into the curriculum.

Javier Lopez is a first year Guatemalan-American student at Tulane University’s Latin American Studies MA program. He started at Tulane after the cancellation of the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship he had in São Paolo, Brazil. He graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in Spanish and International/Intercultural Studies and hopes to get a PhD from Tulane’s Latin American studies program following the completion of his Master‘€™s degree. He hopes to learn Maya Kiche through Tulane’s Mayan Language Institute to fuel his future dissertation research and to connect with this roots/origins. He enjoys meeting new people in new places often through cycling adventures that allow him to experience the world on two wheels.