Student Associates
Theryn Arnold
Doctoral Student, Geography, York University
Theryn is a doctoral student who holds a BA (Hons) in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Windsor and an MA in Labour Studies from McMaster University. His doctoral research seeks to investigate the impact(s) of ‘green capitalism’, in particular the effects of state policy with regard to climate change mitigation and workers health. He hopes to contribute to the debate on Marxist state theory by opening up a discussion between the Marxist eco-socialist literature and state theory literature.
Keywords: Workers; political economy; climate change; state theory
Sabine A. Fernandes
Doctoral Student, Critical Disability Studies, York University
Sabine is a doctoral student in Critical Disability Studies at York University. Their research interests broadly include Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, cross-movement solidarity in disability care organizing, popular political education, the political economy of human rights, and critical access studies.
Keywords: Care work; disablement; migrant workers
Tim Hayslip
Doctoral Student, Sociology, York University
Tim is a doctoral student in York University’s Sociology Program. After earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, he worked for TD Bank and as an English teacher in South Korea. When he returned to academia, he focused on studying classical sociological theory. He earned an MA at Brock University for his thesis, “Dialectical Naturalism,” which situates Soviet dissident philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s contributions within the classical sociological canon. He is currently contributing to a book attempting to popularize an interpretation of Marx’s method. His doctoral research shifts his focus to the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and economic sociology. Specifically, his upcoming dissertation seeks to explain the popularity of the Austrian School of Economics and its suggested remedies for economic malaise: higher interest rates, less market regulation, and the bankruptcies of ‘zombie companies’.
Keywords: Political economy; methods; epistemology
Chris Little
Doctoral Student, Political Science, York University
Chris researches the political economy of migration, agriculture and uneven development, with a focus on how dispossession, extractivism and inequality in the Global South shape labour migration to the North. He is interested in the experience of workers within the structural constraints of the world economy, how agency is exercised amidst these forces, and the social reproduction of labour power. His PhD dissertation research focuses on agrarian labour migration flows between Guatemala and Ontario, Canada, and their relationship to transnational processes of agricultural transformation during the era of neoliberal capitalism. He is seeking to understand how circuits of capital and circuits of labour migration interact and reinforce one another through a hemispheric extractive agricultural economy, and to better understand the experience of migrant workers whose labour power is essential to the maintenance of these circuits.
Keywords: Labour migration; agrarian change; uneven development; Latin America
Alex Moldovan
Doctoral Student, Politics, York University
Alex is a graduate student at York University. His past research has focused on BRICS imperialism throughout Africa and Latin America. Currently he is studying community-based self-defence as an incipient form of dual power that can led to alternative pathways of development, governance and statehoods.
Keywords: China; BRICS; Investment; self-defence
Nithya Nagarajan
Doctoral Student, Politics, York University
Nithya is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics at York University. Her interests encompass indigenous and decolonial studies, anti-racist feminism, Marxism, labour and social movements. Her current work focuses on pedagogy and praxis of labour in the Arab world and Latin America. She is a former student of the National School of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil.
Keywords: Decolonization; marxism; social movements; labour
Paramjit Singh
Doctoral Student, Political Science, York University
Paramjit’s broad area of research is Marxian Political Economy. He is interested in global capitalism, unequal exchange, climate crisis and the agrarian south.
Keywords: Political economy; climate crisis; unequal exchange
Josh Watterton
Doctoral Candidate, Geography, York University
Josh is broadly interested in social and political theory with the programmatic view of effecting positive social change. While Josh’s BA was in Criminology, his MA was in macroeconomics and sociology. His MA thesis focused on capitalist dynamics in the post-war US economy. His areas of concentration are political economic theory and empirical research guiding by this tradition of thought, with an emphasis on the relationship between the role of state-backed military spending on arms production and crisis formation. Josh’s research examines this relationship at a theoretical and philosophical level, in concrete terms in the global-historical sense and in the empirical context if the ‘space-economies’ of contemporary India and the US.
Keywords: Political economy; crisis theory; state theory; military spending and arms production
