Dr. Alessandro Morosin
Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminology
Whether delving into street crime, incarceration, or mining companies in Latin America, sociology is about understanding the deeper structures of our lives. My classes explore the legal system, policing, prisons, borders/migration, and gender inequality. Previously, I taught at DePauw University and the University of San Diego.
I enjoy supporting students in their academic journey to integrate critical thinking and community engagement into their identities, supporting them to become leaders in different areas of their lives. I also regularly invite other working professionals, community organizers, activists and guest authors to my classes and to the ULV campus.
When teaching Senior Thesis (SOC 499), I guide students on how to convert their favorite topics into solo-authored empirical research papers that they present before graduating.
In my research, I interview and support indigenous people in Oaxaca, Mexico who are confronting large mining companies and other forms of dispossession. My first book will be based on this ethnographic research with defensores/as del territorio (land defenders) and community members in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Educational Background
PhD: Sociology, UC Riverside
M.A.: Global and International Studies, UC Santa Barbara
B.A.: Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College
Publications
(2023) Ecocide, Ethnic Rights, and Extractivism: Struggles for Environmental Justice in Mexico. (invited book chapter in Environmental Justice in North America., forthcoming). Paul Rosier (Ed). Routledge: New York
(2023) No a La Mina: Indigenous Organizations’ Rejection of Toxic Mega-Mining in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Melanie A. Medeiros and Jennifer Guzmán (Eds). Insights on Latin America and the Caribbean: An Ethnographic Reader. University of Toronto Press.
(2023) The State, Accumulation, and Oaxaca’s Earthquake Survivors: Three Mechanisms of Inequality. Latin American Perspectives.
(2022) Paramilitaries in Oaxaca, Mexico: Enforcing Accumulation in a Geo-Strategic Region. in Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security. (Routledge)
(2020) Comunalidad, Guendaliza’a, and the Cultural Politics of Anti-Mine Mobilizations in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Journal of Political Ecology volume 27: Special Issue on Time and Temporality in Resource Extraction)
Awards / Honors
Recent Grants and Fellowships
2023-2024: University of La Verne Provost’s Research Grant (“Indigenous Environmental Justice: Participatory Ethnographic Research in Southern Mexico”)
2022-2023: Fellow, Randall Lewis Center for Wellbeing and Research
2020-2021: J. William Asher and Dorothy A. Asher Fund in the Social Sciences, DePauw University. (“Mines, Matriarchy and Mother Earth: Examining Indigenous Movements in Oaxaca, Mexico”)
2021: Social Science Research Council Religion and the Public Sphere Summer Institute for Early-Career Scholars; Santa Fe, New Mexico
Office Hours
Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:30pm
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