Education:

BA, Anthropology & Classical Studies (Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), University of Missouri, Columbia

PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Davis

Position:

Department Head & Professor

Contact:

Email:  mviatori@mun.ca
Phone: (709) 864-8860
Office: Queen's College, QC4008

Research Interests:

I have conducted ethnographic and archival research on inequality, racism, governance, knowledge, and political ecology since 2001. Much of my work has explored how neoliberalized ideas about citizenship, the market, and the environment have become integrated into day-to-day life in ways that perpetuate enduring inequalities. My early research projects focused on the politics of national belonging, linguistic diversity, and rights activism in Ecuador. More recently, my work has focused on the intersections of social inequality and climate change, particularly in coastal Peru. My latest book, The Unequal Ocean, reveals how prevailing representations of the ocean obscure racialized disparities and the ways that different people experience the impacts of the climate crisis. My current research project examines different aspects of the “blue economy” in Peru and throughout the eastern Pacific Ocean to assess how an emergent nexus of ocean conservation and extraction is inscribing new frontiers in ocean zones previously considered socially and geographically “marginal.”

I welcome any undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in doing honours or thesis projects on any of these topics or related issues to contact me.

Selected Publications

BOOKS

Peer-Reviewed Books

• The Unequal Ocean: Living with Environmental Change along the Peruvian Coast. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2023

• Coastal Lives: Nature, Capital, and the Struggle for Artisanal Fisheries in Peru. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. *with Héctor Bombiella

• One State, Many Nations: Indigenous Rights Struggles in Ecuador. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010.

Articles (for a full list please follow the link)

• “Saving the Costa Verde's Waves: Surfing and Discourses of Race–Class in the Enactment of Lima's Coastal Infrastructure” (with Brandon Scheuring). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(1): 84-103. 2020

• “Uncertain Risks: Salmon Science, Harm, and Ignorance in Canada.” American Anthropologist 121(2):325-337. 2019

• “Public Secrets, Muzzled Science: Agnotological Practice, State Performance, and Dying Salmon in British Columbia.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(S1):89-103. 2016

• “Rupture and the Maintenance of Indigenous Alterity: Crises, Borders, and Race in Ecuador, 1941–2008”. Ethnohistory 63(3):497-518. 2016
  
  
• “Defending White-Mestizo Invisibility through the Production of Indigenous Alterity: (Un)Marking Race in Ecuador’s Mainstream Press.”
  Anthropological Quarterly
  89(2): 483-512. 2016