The nearly 200 faculty affiliated with CLACS represent 65 departments and programs across 20 colleges.
To become a CLACS core faculty member, MSU faculty may be nominated by colleagues or may self-nominate by contacting the Director. View the directory of faculty online.
Leonides Murembya, from the Department of Economics, teaches EC412, Economic Analysis of Latin America. The course focuses on the forces that have shaped economic development in Latin America. This includes examination of historic and macroeconomic issues in the development of the region, such as the Atlantic slave trade, the extractive economic systems of the colonial era, the development policies of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) of the 1950s-1970s, the market-oriented reforms of the 1980s, the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the present). The course also explores the microeconomic issues of the region's economic development and how they relate to macroeconomic policies, including policies geared to the reduction or eradication of poverty, food insecurity, inequality, education, violent conflicts, and corruption. Leonides is also collaborating on a book project that focuses on Hispanics in Michigan. He is currently looking for research partners in the economic development of the region.
Alex Allweiss, in the Department of Teacher Education, pursues transnational and interdisciplinary research that explores how entrenched social and political systems shape young people's lives and educational experiences and highlights the transformative possibilities of youth-centered educational spaces. Her work focuses on the Maya Chuj community in Guatemala, where she has worked for more than a decade with community members, schools, and young leaders, and Chuj communities in the United States. Using a decolonial feminist lens, she centers Chuj youth's insights into the ways "modern/colonial" power structures interconnect and operate as well as the possibilities for and messiness of dismantling them to contribute to the fields of comparative and international education, youth studies, feminist and decolonial theories, and critical theories of education.