Congratulations to the recipients of the 2021-2022 SSHRC and FRQSC Scholarships!
ERIGAL is proud to announce that five of its student members have been awarded SSHRC/FRQSC scholarships at the Master's and PhD levels for the 2021-2022 competitions. We take this opportunity to introduce them and their work!
Sarah Elimam, SSHRC Master's Scholarship
Sarah is a student at UQAM under the supervision of Julián Durazo-Herrmann. She is interested in the mechanisms of corruption, its operationalization and its political effects. She graduated in documentary film from the University of Paris 8, and her work currently focuses on the relationships between corruption and development, corruption and political regimes, and state-society relations in the political-economic sphere.
In her dissertation, Sarah explores the paradoxical link between corruption and development. A significant portion of the literature on corruption sees it as a hindrance to economic and social development. Transparency International's Corruption Perception Indexes show a proportional correlation between high corruption and underdevelopment, or between high corruption and authoritarian political regimes. Yet some countries have experienced significant economic growth and development under authoritarian, military and highly corrupt regimes. This paradox is at the heart of this work. Drawing on analyses of Latin America, Sarah focuses on the specific case of South Korea. The research thus proposes to re-problematize the generally accepted link between corruption and development by putting forward a causal link little explored in the literature.
Martine El Ouardi, SSHRC Master's Scholarship
Martine El Ouardi is a master's student in political science at Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Françoise Montambeault. She holds a bachelor's degree in sociology from Université de Montréal and has participated in several research projects in the sociology of culture. She is particularly interested in the relationship with politics and informal citizen participation in urban space.
In her dissertation, Martine focuses on collective gardening projects in public space carried out by citizens in Mexico City. More specifically, she seeks to understand how the political scope of these projects is conceived by those who take part in them and how this conception is co-constructed in the daily work together. Her research thus mobilizes notions such as place-making, the right to the city and DIY politics, while insisting on the particularities of citizen participation in a socio-political context marked by informality.
Louis-Olivier Roy, FRQSC Master's scholarship
Louis-Olivier is a Master's candidate in political science at McGill University. He completed his bachelor's degree in international studies at Université de Montréal. His research interests include gang-related violence in Central America, the costs associated with this violence, and the migration that results from it. He confirmed his interest in Latin America through several long stays in El Salvador, Colombia and Peru where he was able to hold management positions in tourism companies.
In his dissertation, he plans to use the Salvadoran case to study the links between the transfer of funds by migrants to their families (Remesas) and criminal violence. The debate on the motivations of remesas has been discussed in the academic literature since the 1970s. In contrast, the phenomenon of criminal gangs controlling different territories in Latin America is more recent. My research will attempt to establish a causal relationship between variations in crime in El Salvador's 262 municipalities and remesas flows. The research will primarily use quantitative methods, but will attempt to nuance the statistical results with on-site interviews with households receiving remesas.
Andréanne Brunet-Bélanger, FRQSC Doctoral Scholarship
Andréanne Brunet-Bélanger is a doctoral student in political science at Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Françoise Montambeault and Nora Nagels. She holds a bachelor's degree in International Law and International Relations. Her master's thesis sought to explain why women workers in Mexican maquiladoras are not protected by the law inside the factories with regard to discrimination based on maternity. Her doctoral thesis is a continuation of her work on legal transfers, but is distinguished by a focus on understanding how indigenous peoples interpret and appropriate legal norms regarding the right to consultation and consent. More generally, her interests lie in the overlap between the legal and political spheres, and in feminist critiques of law.
Her thesis, entitled "Ontological Conflicts Behind the Application of the Norm of Free, Prior and Informed Consent: The Example of Paraguayan Indigenous Claims before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights," focuses on the problems of implementing the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the norm of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) in Paraguay. It aims to better understand the political processes by which states and indigenous peoples negotiate the interpretation and implementation of the FPIC. Rather than seeking to understand the explanatory factors of the variations in the internal translation of the FPIC norm, the thesis seeks to confront the different ontologies underlying the discourse of state and indigenous actors in order to understand the extent of the differences in the construction of the FPIC object itself. Her research mobilizes the notions of ontological conflict and asymmetrical translation, while emphasizing the importance of legal pluralities in the study of the FPIC.
Julie McClatchie, FRQSC Doctoral Fellowship
Julie McClatchie is a PhD student in political science at Université du Québec à Montréal. She holds a Bachelor's degree in International Relations and International Law (Université du Québec à Montréal) and a Master's degree in International Development and Globalization (University of Ottawa). Her master's thesis focuses on social efficiency as an alternative to the dominant economic efficiency paradigm in natural resource management in Ecuador.
In her doctoral thesis, her research analyzes the weakening of the Buen Vivir institutional alternative in Ecuador, as well as the relations between the State and indigenous movements during and following the abandonment of the Yasuni-ITT development project. By mobilizing decolonial and post-development approaches, particular attention is paid to the role of conflictual diversity in the actualization of the Ecuadorian plurinational model. To address this conflictuality, this project focuses on the institutionalization of political and social diversity’s role in the plurinational state on the implementation and consequences of development policies.
Congratulations again to all !
