Matilde Cordoba Azcarate

Visiting Scholar

Matilde Cordoba Azcarate Matilde Córdoba Azcárate is a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid where she is also a lecturer. Her research has focused on the problematic intersection between development policies and tourism in Mexico and Spain, and, more specifically, in the use of alternative tourisms as development tools. As a member of the international research Tourism, Territory and New Mobilities (Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain) she is currently investigating tourism (im)mobilities, conservation and development policies in the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico). She is also part of the research team Understanding the Dynamics of Urban Flexibility and Reconstruction (Oxford University) intended to develop an analytical framework to question, understand and evaluate notions of urban flexibility in the context of reconstruction following catastrophic disruptions.

Participating Years

2011–2012

How to Fight: Transformational Politics and Culture

In response to contemporary crises of economics and politics one often sees polemics caught between reform and revolution but this division may be false from the position of radical politics and thought. As many have shown, reform has a more radical potential, one that takes social forms seriously enough to push their limits, to create new relations, to pose, as it were, non-reformist reform. Are there philosophical, literary, and aesthetic expressions of possibility that give us some purchase on rethinking how we do what we do?
2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?