Mike Wilson Becerril
Visiting Assistant Professor
Peace & Conflict Studies
Latin American & Latino Studies
Environmental Studies
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Prof. Wilson-Becerril is an activist-scholar specialized in the political ecologies of violence, resistance, and justice, with a focus on Latin America. He is the author of Resisting Extractivism: Peruvian Gold, Everyday Violence, and the Politics of Attention (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and other works published in the Journal of Resistance Studies, Feminist Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, Peace Review, Human Rights Review, the co-edited volume Violent Conflict and Civil Resistance in Latin America (Palgrave, 2019), The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, the North American Congress on Latin America, the Environmental Justice Atlas, ROAR Magazine, Truthout, Latino Rebels, and other venues.
He has conducted extensive fieldwork on environmental justice in Peru, on everyday violence in Mexico, and on Indigenous rights in Costa Rica and Guyana. His research has been supported by a University of California Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholarship from the United States Institute of Peace, and a Ph.D. Fellowship from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, among others. Originally from Mexico City, he holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Prof. Wilson-Becerril’s courses examine themes like colonialism, war, militarization, pain, trauma, fear, epistemic erasure, oppression, genocide, law, development, ecocide, poverty, inequality, resistance, insurgency, intersectionality, decolonization, and peacebuilding in depth. His teaching is explicitly crafted to cultivate our collective healing, particularly through critical reflection on structural and embodied forms of power—including race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and more—consciously centering the experiences and voices of marginalized groups.
His work integrates policy advocacy and activism as well as public engagement. Outside of academia, he has served as a nonprofit advocacy writer, policy consultant, campaign organizer, and elected union representative (UC Student Workers Union). Before graduate school, he served as student body president, creator and co-host of a news radio show, News Editor of a print newspaper, and community organizer.
(TL;DR: Person who has spent half of his life living in Latin America and the other half researching it due to homesickness.) Please reach out via https://linktr.ee/
