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
Sourav Banerjee
Doctoral Student, History, York University
Sourav is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of History at York University, working under Professor Rukmini Barua on the socio-spatial dimensions of colonial urban governance in Calcutta. He is investigating the primacy of colonial capital in shaping the urban process of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta. He is primarily interested in studying the aspects of imperialism, changing characteristics of capital exchange and spatial aspects of finance capital. He is also interested in studying the “biopolitical” aspects of colonial rule in relation to class and race in the global south. He is also drawn to the structuralist school of Marxism, and trying to work, read and apply Althusser and Poulantzas’ theory in his research.
Keywords: Imperialism; urbanization; colonialism
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
Misook Hong Goodman
Doctoral Student, Political Science, York University
I am a doctoral student in Political Science at York University. I completed my undergraduate studies in Seoul, South Korea, and later earned an MA in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada, along with the Collaborative Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
I became involved in leftist student movements during my undergraduate years and continued my involvement in labour and socialist organizing in Korea throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I was a founding member of the International Socialist Students of South Korea (ISSK) and the International Socialist Workers’ Group of South Korea, affiliated with Tony Cliff’s Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in Britain. I edited organizational publications, facilitated worker consciousness-raising and political education groups, and organized socialist reading groups on Korean history, revolutionary movements, Dependency Theory and Marxist political economy.
My current research focuses on South Korea’s revolutionary movements of the 1980s and 1990s. I am particularly interested in how class and gender intersected in political subject formation, collective identity and symbolic politics within the radical left, and how these processes shaped political mobilization, legitimacy and the movement’s transformative aspirations.
Keywords: Labour and class politics; class–gender intersectionality; gender and political subject formation
Tim Hayslip
Doctoral Student, Sociology, York University
Tim is a PhD student in sociology at York University. His research focuses on the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and economic sociology, seeking to explain the popularity of the Austrian School of Economics.
Keywords: Austrian; Marx; profit; dialectic
Sophia Ilyniak
Doctoral Candidate, Geography, York University
Sophia Ilyniak is a doctoral candidate at York University’s Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change. She studies urbanization, imperialism and the third sector (NGOs, nonprofits) from the perspective of Marxist geography. Sophia’s current research examines the political economy of the war-time rebuilding of Ukraine.
Keywords: Marxist geography; urbanization; imperialism; third sectory
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
Olena Lyubchenko
Doctoral Student, Politics, York University
Olena is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at York University and an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her research and teaching focuses on the political economy of the Soviet Union in a global context and on primitive accumulation and social reproduction in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. Olena is an editor at LeftEast and Midnight Sun Magazine and an affiliate with Alameda Institute.
Keywords: Social reproduction; (post)Soviet political economy; gender and work
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
Christopher Sorio
Master’s Student, Geopgraphy, York University
Chris is a graduate student in Human Geography at York University and an activist-scholar whose intellectual work is grounded in the relationship between Marxist theory, workers’ struggles, and collective organizing. His research examines precarious labour, racialized and migrant workforces, labour internationalism, and the possibilities and limits of community unionism under contemporary capitalism. His current MA thesis focuses on the Fresh Del Monte plant in Oshawa, Ontario, examining how outsourcing and triangular employment fragment the working class and reshape the terrain of workplace organizing.
His engagement with Marxism emerges from a longer history of political education and organizing in the Philippines and Canada. This experience informs his commitment to understanding workers not simply as objects of research but as producers of knowledge and agents of social transformation. His work brings labour geography and Marxist political economy into conversation with questions of migration, imperialism, racialization, precarity, and the changing composition of the working class.
His relationship to MSGAP lies particularly in its commitment to connecting Marxist analysis with concrete historical and contemporary struggles. He is interested in how Marxist concepts can illuminate the present conjuncture while remaining attentive to praxis: the relationship between theory, workers’ knowledge, political organization, solidarity, and the possibilities for transformative collective action.
Keywords: Workers; capital; imperialism
F. Evnur Taran
Doctoral Candidate, Critical Human Geography, York University
Evnur is a doctoral candidate in Critical Human Geography at York University. She has an interdisciplinary background, holding BA (Hons.) in International Studies from Glendon College, MA in Development Studies from York University, and a graduate diploma in Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the transboundary structural asymmetries in the Çoruh/Ch’orokhi River basin (in the Eastern Black Sea-South Caucasus Region) and contributing new insights into the spatial and political dimensions of social-environmental (in)justice. In doing so, she aims to deepen theoretical understandings of displacement and immobility beyond the conventional emphasis on physical relocation, highlighting the complex ways in which communities may be “displaced in place” through layered environmental, economic, and political constraints. Drawing on hydropower energy, political ecology, development, and migration scholarship, and guided by the Marxist and Feminist Ecological Frameworks, she explores rural communities on the borderlands of Türkiye and Georgia along the Çoruh/Ch’orokhi River that are affected by multiple hydropower developments on the river.
Keywords: Hydropower dams; South Caucasus region; Çoruh/Ch’orokhi River; uneven development; social-environmental (in)justice
Viktoriya Vinik
Doctoral Candidate, Political Science, York University
Viktoriya researches the political economy of property and state power in Israel-Palestine, engaging state theory to examine how property relations underpin class formation and accumulation. Her dissertation analyzes how the Israeli state, as landlord and regulator, transforms land and housing into instruments of domination and class reproduction. Focusing on Airbnb’s expansion in the occupied West Bank, she explores how platform capitalism articulates with colonial property regimes. Through this work, she contributes to Marxist debates on the state, property, rent, and capitalist development.
Keywords: State debate; property relations; settler colonialism; class formation
Nadine Violette
Doctoral Candidate, Social and Political Thought, York University
Nadine is a Toronto-based educator and SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in Social and Political Thought at York University. Their research brings Marxist theory into conversation with psychoanalysis and anti-colonial thought to examine education as a material process of ideological formation and revolutionary transformation. Focusing on the global history of communist education and re-education—from the classroom to the prison—they study how struggles over knowledge, labour and subjectivity shape the conditions of freedom under capitalism.
Their dissertation situates Maoist and Leninist pedagogical experiments within the broader development of global Marxism, tracing their circulation across Asia, Africa and Latin America. This work aligns with MSGAP’s commitment to analyzing capitalism, imperialism, and liberation through historical-materialist and internationalist frameworks. Nadine’s relation to MSGAP lies in advancing a dialectical understanding of education as both a means of reproduction and a weapon of transformation within global class struggle.
Nadine is also a contributor at The Vermin, a critical literary collective centring the marginal and periphery, and works with the British Columbia First Nations Justice Council preparing legal reports in support of Indigenous clients through restorative justice alternatives to incarceration.
Keywords: Marxism; Maoism; education; culture; imperialism
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 U.S.
Keywords: Political economy; crisis theory; state theory; military spending and arms production
