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October 20, 2021

Denise Meda Calderon Earns Graduate Fellowship

The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI) and the Carlos H. Cantu Endowment at Texas A&M University have offered Denise Meda Calderon a Graduate Fellowship in Latinx Studies. This Fellowship is offered annually to one Ph.D. level student whose research contributes to the field of Latinx studies and/or analyses of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. […]

The Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI) and the Carlos H. Cantu Endowment at Texas A&M University have offered Denise Meda Calderon a Graduate Fellowship in Latinx Studies. This Fellowship is offered annually to one Ph.D. level student whose research contributes to the field of Latinx studies and/or analyses of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.

As part of the Fellowship collaborates with Dr. Felipe Hinojosa and Dr. Troy Harden in work related to the Cantu Endowment and RESI, including working on coordination for the Latinx Lecture Series. Each Fellow is awarded $10,000 in funds to further their research in the field. This represents a great opportunity to expand Denise’s research and allow travel to conferences to present her work.

Denise’s current research involves a study of communal practices, such as ritual activity, that involve embodied and lived relations with others. In particular, she is looking at how rituals of death are sites of resistance for communities combating racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism. She engages Chicanx philosophy, Latinx philosophy, scholarship of death, and resistance scholarship to analyze the historical and social dimensions of death and the rituals surrounding this life event. Her project focuses on Chicanx communities and asks: ‘What are the histories of practices surrounding death?’, ‘What do the practices show about the collective and social dimensions of death?’, and ‘How should we treat death in rituals of community resistance?’ With these questions in mind, she will theorize how rituals of death can function to revitalize communities that face different modes of oppression.