Maurice (Mauricio) Rafael Magaña received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Oregon where his dissertation, Youth in Movement: the Cultural Politics of Autonomous Youth Activism in Southern Mexico, was named as one of the “50 Best Dissertations in Cultural Anthropology of 2013.”
Dr. Magañas research focuses on the cultural politics of youth organizing, transnational migration, urban space, and social movements in Mexico and the United States. His research provides a transnational perspective on historic marginalization, racialization, youth political culture and the role of art in activism. His book Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, is available through the University of California Press.
Maurice R. Magaña is a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence, a board member of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, and previously served on the board of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Before coming to the University of Arizona, Maurice R. Magaña was the2013-14 UCLA Institute of American Cultures Visiting Fellow Researcher in Chicano Studies and a2012-13 Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Magaña’s research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Ford Foundation and the Tokyo Foundation. His work has been published in scholarly journals like the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Social Justice, and the Journal of Contemporary Anthropology, as well as in the edited volume, Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below.
Professor Magaña’s classes have included: Youth, Culture and Social Change; Latina/o Ethnography; Immigrant Rights, Labor and Higher Education; Introduction to Social Justice; and Popular Culture and Latina/o Identities.