Margaret Marietta Ramírez hired as the inaugural Associate Director of Latina/o-Chicana-o Studies
We are thrilled to announce that MM (Magie) Ramírez has joined us at CCSRE as the inaugural Associate Director of Latina/o-Chicana-o Studies. Dr. Ramírez is a feminist urban geographer whose work analyzes how minoritized peoples across North America resist dispossession and other urban injustices through spatial, cultural and artistic practices. She explores these themes across space and scale in her research and teaching, thinking transnationally and intersectionally to understand how cities are contested and spatially remade in the everyday by Latinx, Black, and Indigenous communities.
Dr. Ramírez’ most recent research project, ‘Gentrification, cultural politics & housing justice in Mexico City’, examines the increase of Airbnb units in Mexico City over the past five years, and how the financialization of housing and rapid increase in foreign remote workers in Mexico City have fueled the eviction and displacement of low-income residents in the Colonia Juarez neighborhood. In collaboration with housing justice activist Sergio González, of the organization 06600 Plataforma Vecinal y Observatorio de la Colonia Juarez, and a team of undergraduate students, the Proyecto Juaricua Housing Justice Lab is producing a series of digital maps that visualize the increase in Airbnb and trouble the gentrification and ‘blanqueamiento por despojo’ that have shifted the cultural fabric of the neighborhood.
Proyecto Juaricua is greatly informed by Dr. Ramírez’ previous research on urban dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as her ongoing collaboration with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, for which she served as a co-editor of the 2021 edited volume Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance. Dr. Ramírez’ writings on gentrification, Latinx geographies and anticolonial feminisms have also been published in journals such as Antipode, Society & Space, and Urban Geography, and in edited collections such as Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (2021), Abolishing Poverty (2023) and Key Thinkers on Space & Place (2024). MM is also a founding member of the Latinx Geographies Specialty Group, and on the editorial boards of the cultural geographies and Dialogues in Human Geography journals. Prior to joining CCSRE as the Associate Director of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies, she was an Assistant Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University, a Creative Cities Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford, and she earned her doctorate in Geography at the University of Washington.
Welcome, Dr. Ramírez, to our CCSRE community!