Marcos Mendoza

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Email:
mendoza@olemiss.edu
Office Location:
547 Lamar Hall
Phone:
662-915-7343

Anthropology professor

Research Interests

My research interests include: 1) environmentalism, capitalist development, resource politics, and risk society; 2) organized crime, insecurity and violence, law, and sociopolitical mobilization; 3) political theory, republicanism, empire, and revolution; 4) aesthetics, the body, tourism, and extreme sports. I have ongoing projects in Mexico and Argentina. My current book project is entitled Guardian Protectors: On Popular Mobilization and Public Insecurity in Mexico. It examines how sociopolitical movements have formed to contest widespread public insecurity deriving from organized crime, state complicity, the war on drugs, and irregular violence. Focusing ethnographically on rural communities from Michoacán state, the book shows how these sociopolitical movements are expressions of constituent power in action. Drawing upon idioms of self-defense, justice, liberation, and peace, these popular mobilizations speak to major challenges confronting contemporary republics in the twenty-first century. Guardian Protectors contributes to debates in political and legal anthropology, sociolegal studies, and political theory. I also conduct research focused on the green economy and resource politics in Patagonia as well as mountain-glacial sociality in the Andes. Previous research has attended to the productive intersection of conservation, ecotourism, landscape aesthetics, and sustainable development in relation to national politics in Argentina. Ongoing research explores histories of capitalist territorialization, rewilding initiatives, the legal politics of protected areas, and mountaineering culture in Patagonia.

Biography

I’m a sociocultural anthropologist and political ecologist by training. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2013. At the University of Mississippi, I am a core faculty member in Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and Latin American & Caribbean Studies, as well as working closely with the International Studies program and the Honors College.