RESEARCH INTERESTS

Political sociology, social movements, sociology of agriculture and food, political economy of the world system, state-society relations in semiperipheral nations, the neoliberal food regime, and migration and farm-workers’ health.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Gerardo Otero is Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University (SFU). He is an Associate Member of the Latin American Studies Program and of the School of International Studies at SFU, and an Adjunct Professor in the Development Studies Doctoral Program at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, in Mexico. He received his B.A. in Business Administration at the Instituto Technológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM, 1975), an M.A. in Latin American Studies, with a major in Economics, at the University of Texas at Austin (1977), and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986. Dr. Otero has held a faculty appointment at SFU since 1990.

In Mexico, where he was born and raised, Dr. Otero taught economics at ITESM and sociology at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in 1977, social anthropology at the Autonomous University of Puebla from 1980 to 1983, and sociology at the University of Guadalajara from 1987 to 1990. He was a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Center for U.S. – Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 1986-1987, and a visiting faculty in Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1989-1990. In 2001, he was an associate professor of sociology at Tulane University.

Dr. Otero has published more than 70 articles in edited collections and scholarly journals (see Selected Articles). Dr. Otero’s books (see Books) include: Gerardo Otero. 1999. Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico. (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, translated to Spanish in 2004 by M.A. Porrúa in Mexico); Gerardo Otero, ed.   Neoliberalism Revisited: Economic Restructuring and Mexico’s Political Future (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview 1996); Gerardo Otero, ed. 2004. Mexico in Transition: Neoliberal Globalism, the State, and Civil Society. (London: Zed Books. Translated to Spanish in 2006 by M.A. Porrúa in Mexico); Gerardo Otero, ed. 2008. Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and  Biotechnology in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.