New faculty profile – Egla Martinez-Salazar

by Nicole Findlay

Long before she began an examination of human rights from the remove of the academe, Egla Martinez-Salazar witnessed the human, social and environmental impact of state-sanctioned violence.

Her research focuses on the racialization and gendering of state terror and social inequality.

“I am interested in researching processes and issues pertaining to critical human rights and citizenship, Indigenous and postcolonial feminist knowledge as well as environmental justice.”

Influenced by her childhood in Guatemala, a period during which she witnessed first-hand the government-sponsored oppression of the country’s indigenous peoples, Martinez-Salazar became an advocate for education and interlocking human-rights initiatives at any early age while simultaneously learning and respecting the complex relationship between good theorizing and practice, which is for her one of the most important principles of active critical thinking.

At thirteen, she created a summer school for students who had to repeat failed subjects. She also organized social activities for the small town’s children.

The success of the community youth projects proved a catalyst leading Martinez-Salazar to her forced migration first to Mexico, where she became involved in the Guatemalan and Central American human-rights-social justice movement, and later to Canada. Eventually she earned a Masters in Environmental Studies and her PhD in sociology at York University.

“From a young age I loved to read everything I could have access to and ask questions on ‘big’ issues and I think this earlier interest developed further by witnessing first-hand the human and social impact power and inequality has.”

Martinez-Salazar joined the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s Studies and the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies as an assistant professor in July 2006.