Valeria León
Valeria León is an illustrator, relational and visual artist. She holds a Master in illustrated children’s picture book and one in arts pedagogy. Her work focuses on creating aesthetic and pedagogical projects with children in the rural Andean areas of Ecuador. She is interested in the creation of relational ecologies that generate new links with the territory. Particularly, she is interested in using clay and bioart elements to pay attention to land memories. Her artistic work is marked by sensitivity and attention to contexts’ subtle aspects, which allows her to foster reflection and expand awareness through shared experiences in a plurality of contexts.
Adolfo Verdugo
My name is Adolfo Verdugo, I was born in Bulán, Paute – Azuay. I am a biologist and associate researcher at the “HA” Herbarium of the University of Azuay, with more than 20 years of experience in botanist studies of the region. I have co-authored several scientific publications and have worked as a botanical consultant on important projects in Ecuador. In addition, I served as principal consultant in the studies for the creation of the Icto-Cruz Ecological Park in the city of Cuenca. Currently, I am a professor and coordinator of a diploma in Agroecology at the University of Azuay, a project that I am deeply passionate about because it integrates my interest in conservation and sustainable development.
Paul Verdugo
I’m Paul. My whole life was spent in the countryside, in rural areas and everything that this implies constantly traverses me. In rural communities, your community members are ,in some way, an extension of your family, they are people who occupy your thoughts, you know their light and shadow. This is part of the community life. It makes me. It informs who I think I am: a human who is concerned about how humans relate to other humans, and—since studying biology— a human who cares about how humans relate to the non-human on this planet, the largest community. And sometimes, to avoid ulcers, I make small films… to try to untangle everything that my head weaves, and on the side, to sodisfy the shungo (heart in kichwa) with another of those many things that make me happy: cinema.
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her SSHRC-funded research program, spanning the global South and North, focuses on the reconceptualization of early childhood education at the critical junctions of ecological and social justice.
Cristina Delgado Vintimilla
Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University and a fellow researcher at York University Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research is deeply informed by her background as a pedagogista within the Italian tradition. Her area of research is pedagogy as living knowledge and as that which thinks and troubles education as a normative project. Currently, her research focus on creating pedagogical inquiries and pedagogies that address the complexities of educational contexts (formal and informal) in the Global North and South. As a pedagogista, Cristina is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as a generative intersection for imagining alternative onto-epistemologies.
Verónica Durán
Verónica Durán is a comunera, pedagogue and writer. Verónica has worked on issues of interculturality and linguistic revitalization.
Narda Nelson
Narda Nelson is a pedagogist with the University of Victoria Child Care Services. Drawing on her background in gender studies and upbringing in the beautiful but extraction-weary Treaty 8 territory of northern Alberta, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to early childhood with a particular focus on reimagining ethical futures with plant, animal, & waste flow relations in early childhood. Narda is a PhD student with Western University’s Faculty of Education, and a member of the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory & Common Worlds Research Collective.
Juan Pablo Pinto Mendoza
Juan Pablo Pinto Mendoza is a documentary filmmaker and media artist. Born in Colombia, Juan Pablo immigrated to Canada at the age of 19. He draws on his experience as an immigrant as well as his academic background in politics and anthropology to explore themes of identity, culture, memory and discourse. He enjoys using poetic and experimental approaches as well as magical realism to fulfill his artistic vision. Pinto Mendoza aspires to challenge his audience to question notions of nationhood and belonging in their everyday interactions. His recent work has focused on issues related to indigeneity, food and land sovereignty, and environmental activism.
Sebastián Oreamuno
I’m a queer, disabled artist-academic who was born in Santiago, Chile, on Mapuche territory. I grew up on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territory and I’m currently based in Tkarón:to, which has been care-taken by many First Nations, including the present treaty holders the Mississaguas of the Credit. I’m grateful to (study) dance on this land and to be completing a doctorate in Dance Studies on the relationship between movement and memory.
Photo credit: Nadine Ryan
Raffaella Ansaloni
Originally from Italy, she has lived in Cuenca, Ecuador since 1990. Raffaella has a PhD in Biodiversity and Conservation of the Natural Environment, from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She is the current Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Azuay and professor and researcher with more than 30 years of experience. She has been the coordinator of the biology degree and the director of the Province of Azuay’s Herbarium. She has written and presented her research in the field of botany in journals, books and national and international events.
David Fajardo Torres
David Fajardo Torres is an ecologist lawyer and political scientist. David is a defender of the Rights of Nature, including the rights of the human species. Member of the ecological collective Yasunidos and of Cabildo por el Agua de Cuenca.
Miriam Quezada Aguirre
My name Miriam Quezada Aguirre. I was born in Chalcay which belongs to the Cochapata Parish of Nabón in Azuay, I come from a very humble and peasant family in which I grew up and inherited many values that I now put into practice. Approximately 7 years ago I joined a Collective called Struggle and Defense for Water and Life of the “Cerro el Mozo” to resist the rampant and aggressive mining presence in our territory. I am part of the users of the Irrigation Water Boards, a user and Member of the Board of Directors of Water for Human Consumption, a member of the Coordination of the National Anti-Mining Front and finally I am the President of the Water’s Communal Government in the Province of Azuay.
Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman
Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman (she/her) is an instructor and atelierista in the Early Childhood Education Department, Capilano University (Canada) and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Education, Western University (Canada). Tatiana thinks at the intersection of pedagogy and arts and design, as she works to re-imagine relationship-attuned play as worlding and play/ground(ing) as potentialities. With background in arts and landscape architecture, Tatiana is deeply committed to thinking and doing early childhood education in critical, generative, and interdisciplinary ways.
Alex Jimenes Arpi
Alex has a degree in agro-engineering (University of Cuenca). Since highschool Alex has been actively involved in multiple grassroots associations and organizations such as the Assembly of the Peoples of the South and the National Anti-Mining Front. Recently, in order to make a single force in the province of Azuay he joined others to create the Water’s Community Government of Azuay. This organization has carried out two large mobilizations from the peasant and indigenous sectors in resistance to the advancement of mining in the region.
Danielle Castillo Chen
Daniella Castillo Chen is panamanian writer, filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada. She studied Film Production at York University and is currently working as Production Coordinator for Blink49 Studios.
Denielle Elliott
Denielle Elliott is a Professor and York Research Chair at York University, with a cross appointment in the Departments of Anthropology and Social Science (Health and Society). She is also the Deputy Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society. Her research focuses on arts-based ethnography and the intersections of medicine, science, and politics. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on HIV/AIDS care and treatment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Nairobi and Kisumu, Kenya. She is currently working on a project that explores the sensoria of neurological disorders. She is the author of Reimagining Science and Statecraft in Postcolonial Kenya (Routledge), the co-editor of A Different Kind of Ethnography (University of Toronto Press) and Naked Fieldnotes (University Minnesota Press).
Alicja Frankowski
Alicja Frankowski is a PhD student at York University’s Faculty of Education. Her research has taken her from the position of a teacher action researcher, as she traced movement pedagogies in an early childhood playground, to thinking with pedagogical conditions in the work of the pedagogist. Alicja is currently thinking with speculative curiosity as an important insertion and condition within pedagogical work. She does so, as a response to the current voyeuristic, anthropocentric, and colonial implications that are currently haunting inquiry work in early education.
Teresa Humphrey
Teresa Humphrey is a PhD student at York University’s Faculty of Education. She enters this new role carrying experiences as a kindergarten teacher and her interest in the school yard situated as a site for collective rethinking, and where what is value as learning is called into question. Her pedagogical work grapples with what else might matter when otherwise possibilities of engaging are valued, and what else might be imaginable if other points of view, including attunements with the more-than-human, are included.
