Graduate Student Research
Partly because of our prairie location, the KU Latin American Studies program puts a priority not only on studying Latin America and Iberia, but on opportunities for students to study Latin America in Latin America . KU has strong institutional connections, including faculty and student exchanges, as well as collaborative research projects, with universities in Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil. These relationships facilitate graduate student research in those countries.
Every year the Center helps encourage graduate field research through a variety of grants and fellowships. The students highlighted below were all recipients of Tinker Foundation Field Research Grants in 2009.
Please check out the 2011 Graduate Student Research Competition under our Graduate Funding Section
Stacey Burton
MA Student in Latin American Studies
"Over the summer I was able to use my Tinker Grant to conduct research on Indigenous Women in Nicaragua . I examined gendered violence on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, with a primary focus on the indigenous Miskitu and Afro-descent peoples. My specific area of focus was on the multiple discourses in which gendered violence is performed. Western ideals of gendered violence generally focus on physical abuse. I was able to show that indigenous gendered violence takes on different forms, involving religion and spirituality, restriction to reproductive choice, economic limitations, and lack of access to education and healthcare.
Living mainly in the large Indigenous city of Puerto Cabezas in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN), I had access to resources at both of the local universities as well as access to regional and local government officials. During my time in Nicaragua I was able to visit several villages with populations ranging from 200 to 1000 people. Trips to the villages allowed me to access smaller populations as well as to document the lack of financial support in the villages. I was able to understand how inter-familial sexual abuse takes place and the direct connection to lack of education among young women. During my trip I was able to interview female government officials, police officers, teachers, mothers, adolescent females and Honduran leaders. In addition, I was able to attend several different summits and understand the connection to land rights and land resources. "
Ian Gowan
PhD Student in Spanish & Portuguese
"The Tinker Foundation Travel Research Grant allowed me to travel to Argentina this summer to carry out an investigation in Argentine Contemporary Independent Theatre and Performance. Before travelling to Argentina, I was already familiar with the history and culture of the country, because I had spent a semester there as an undergraduate student. Despite my previous travel experience, this summer was my very first contact with live performances from Argentina , and it was invaluable to me as a student of Latin American Theatre.
I was in Argentina from June 2 nd to June 29 th and during that time I saw over 30 live performances, had both formal and informal interviews with directors, actors, playwrights, politicians, intellectuals, audience members, journalists, and artistic directors at various theatres across the country. In addition, I attended political conferences, book reviews, academic panels, and street performances. I also made regular visit to the Argentine National Cinema where I saw film screenings of Argentine national films that will not arrive to the US for months (if ever).With the information that I have acquired in this extraordinary trip, I plan to write a conference paper which I will be able to present in the future, present a Merienda talk at KU, and develop my dissertation proposal. "
John Kelly
PhD Student in Geography
In rural Mexico , indigenous culture and identity is reproduced mainly at the village level ( ejido or comunidad agraria ). Village-level control of lands and resources throughout rural Mexico is being challenged by the federal PROCEDE land reform program and its successor, FANAR. These same indigenous areas are ten times more likely than other areas to contain clean, abundant water sources. As regional demand for water soars in coming years, its value will escalate, and government-private partnerships will compensate landowners and caretakers. If village-level control has disappeared, individuals and outsiders will instead benefit from this compensation, likely triggering resentment, instability, or violence in indigenous areas, along with loss of indigenous identity and presence.
To explore and illuminate the responses to changes in local land tenure, particularly regarding water, I gathered data in the field, from November 2008 to March 2009, from two primary sources: 1. Participatory research mapping with the inhabitants of Tale de Castro, an indigenous Zapotec village in the state of Oaxaca; 2. Reading historical land tenure and community records from 20 Oaxaca communities, stored at the Registro Agrario Nacional (RAN) state office in Oaxaca.
With the Tinker grant for summer fieldwork in 2009, I was able to return to Mexico from June 30 to July 25, 2009, to supplement and extend my data set... My work over the summer reinforced the importance of taking the time to establish personal (though professional) relationships with the bureaucratic personnel upon whom one depends for the privilege of collecting data from government agencies such as the RAN. Furthermore, I learned to be on the lookout for invaluable morsels of observations which these personnel would occasionally offer to me. While it is of course important to have specific examples from written records, nonetheless many hours of perusing documents in the search for general trends can be saved by simply asking someone who works in the office what they have noticed during their work experiences. One RAN worker, Gabriel, was particularly generous with his comments, and quickly cleared up several mistaken assumptions I had concerning land tenure practice and history.
Andrea Romero
PhD Student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
I received a Tinker Grant to study the effects of forest fragmentation on rodent communities in Costa Rica. The purpose of this project was to survey several sites in the lowland rainforests of Costa Rica to discern if forest patch size affects the community composition of rodents. Preliminary data I had collected in 2007, indicated that the community composition of rodents in forest patches could be quite different at relatively small spatial scales. This summer, with the help of the Tinker Grant, I was able to survey more forest fragments and I trapped rodents in an additional six sites (Map 1). Each site was surveyed by placing over 200 Sherman live traps and checking traps daily. All animals caught were identified, marked, weighed, sexed, and released. I had a total of over 40 individual captures representing three species. Trap success in this area of Costa Rica is very low (about 1% trap success), thus, my recommendation for anyone interested in participating in a similar study is to have a lot of patience and work as hard as possible to collect as many individuals as possible. The data are currently being analyzed to discern patterns of community composition differences based on forest patch size. Though I have not finished the analysis, the data seem to suggest that there are definite differences in community structure; in some small and isolated plots, we were even unable to catch any rodents suggesting very low populations or even absence of rodents. This project represents the most exhaustive study on small mammal communities in this area to date.
2010 Tinker Recipeints:
| Name | Level | Department | Destination | Topic |
| Clarice Amorim | MA | Anthropology | Guatemala | |
| Mara Aubel | MA | Latin American Studies | Brazil | |
| Andrew Bailey | MA | LAS, Business | Brazil | |
| Adam Benfer | MA | Anthropology | Costa Rica | |
| Stacey Burton | MA | Latin American Studies | Nicaragua | |
Mirna Cabrera |
PhD | Music | Cuba | Esteban Salas (1725-1803): Performing a Cuban Baroque Composer |
| Winchell Delano | MA | History | Argentina | |
| Lynette Dornak | MA | Geography | Brazil | |
| Hispano Duron | PhD | Film Media Studies | Central America | |
| Phillip Fox | MA | History | Spain | |
| Kevin Freudenburg | MA | Political Science | Spain | |
Andrés Lira |
PhD | Ecology & Evo. Biology | Mexico | |
| David Lisenby | PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Cuba | |
| Tiffany Miller | MA | Spanish & Portuguese | Guatemala | |
| Andy Norris | MA | Geography | Mexico | |
| Regan Postma | PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Mexico | |
| Erin Sheridan | MA | LAS, Business | Brazil | |
| Sydney Silverstein | MA | Anthropology | Peru | |
| Stephanie Stillo | MA | History | Spain | |
| Taylor Tappan | MA | Geography | Nicaragua |
2009 Tinker Recipients:
| Name | Level | Department | Destination | Topic |
| Emilia Barbosa | PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Guatemala | Violence and its Representations in Contemporary Guatemala and Honduras |
| Mattias Beverinotti | MA | Spanish & Portuguese | Mexico | Mexican Playwright Hugo Rascón Banda |
| Stacey Burton | MA | Latin American Studies | Nicaragua | Gendered Violence in Nicaragua |
| Jessica Craig | PhD | Anthropology | Guatemala | Ancient Mayan Buildings and Monuments |
Antoinette Egitto |
PhD | Anthropology | Costa Rica | Costa Rican Archeology |
| Alberto Fonseca | PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Mexico | Narco-narratives in Mexican Literature |
| Ian Gowan | PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Argentina | Argentine Theatre |
| Andy Hilburn | PhD | Geography | Mexico | Rural Waste Management in Puebla, Mexico |
| Anne Justice | PhD | Anthropology | Guatemala | Genetic Mapping of Indigenous Populations |
| John Kelly | PhD | Geography | Mexico | Land Tenure in Indigenous Mexico |
Arturo Meijide Lapide |
PhD | Spanish & Portuguese | Spain | Violence in Spanish Novels and Films of the 1990s |
| Andrew Norris | MA | Geography | Mexico | Land Use and Reform Changes in San Luis Potosi, Mexico |
| Heather Putnam | PhD | Geography | Brazil | Coffee Cooperatives and Rural Development in Southern Brazil |
| Aida Ramos Viera | PhD | Geography | Mexico | Forest Conservation and Land Reform in San Luis Potosi, Mexico |
| Lisa Rausch | PhD | Geography | Brazil | Environmental Governance and Economic Development in Brazilian Agriculture |
| Andrea Romero | PhD | Ecology & Evo. Biology | Costa Rica | Small Mammal Communities in Lowland Tropical Rainforests |
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