2011-07-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

About

Marilyn J. Andrews is a social scientist with an interest in indigenous rights and new media. She is originally from Detroit, MI and first attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There she received her B.A. in English, History and Spanish. In 1999, she moved to Concepción, Chile where she spent the next year and a half experiencing life as a foreigner. She began her graduate career in 2002 in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She received her M.A. in Anthropology in 2004. Later that year she transferred to the Department of Life Sciences Communication which more fully encompasses her research interests. While pursuing her Ph.D. she also attended Concordia University Wisconsin where she received her M.S. in Education and fulfilled the requirements for Wisconsin's Department of Public Instruction Secondary Teaching Certificate, along with an Alternative Education License, for English, Social Studies and Spanish.

Throughout her varied experiences, Marilyn has had many teaching opportunities. Beginning as a Teacher of English in Chile, she began to develop her skills and realized she had a real love for the profession. She continued to hone her teaching abilities as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. She has taught both general anthropology and cultural anthropology, in which she led multiple discussion sections based on professor lectures. She has over two years experience teaching introductory Spanish in which she was the sole teacher for a full class that met five times a week. She has also taught a class in her own department, Life Sciences Communication, in which she was the sole teacher responsible for instructing her students in the ways to improve their written and oral communication skills. Throughout these years she also pursued her M.S. in Education. This presented her with the opportunity to student teach in all of her fields at both the middle school and the high school level. Additionally she has worked with multiple students who were at-risk and in special education classes.

She is currently living in southeastern Michigan and working on her dissertation. Her research focuses on the use of the Internet as a means of self-representation and how Mapuche organizations use this medium to promote a collective identity with the ultimate aim of legitimizing their claims of self-determination. The Mapuche are an indigenous people who inhabit the southern cone of South America. As part of her research she spent time interviewing Mapuche during the summer of 2007 and 8 months between 2009 and 2010 in Temuco, Chile, while conducting her fieldwork.