María de Lourdes Argüelles

Professor of Education and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University

Principal Investigator, The Other Face of Poverty:  A Grassroots Think Tank Project, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ($350,000 grant).

Co-Principal Investigator, Test Edge National Demonstration Project (Congressional Appropriation, administered through the Fund for the Improvement of Education, Department of Education, Washington D.C., $1 million)

Co-Principal Investigator, Pitzer in Ontario Community Studies Program (anonymous donor $1.2 million grant).

Ph.D. in Education, New York University

M.S., Counseling, Barry University

B.A., Economics, University of Miami

License: 

Marriage and Family Therapist (California license # 23571)

Lourdes Arguelles received her Ph.D. at New York University from the Center for Human Relations and Community Studies of the School of Education. Her concentrations were in Psychology and Sociology. She did post-doctoral work in law and psychiatry at Osgood Hall Law School at York University in Canada and in ethnic studies at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Arguelles is a licensed marriage, child, and family therapist in the state of California.  She was recently a visiting scholar at the Center for Process Studies of the Claremont School of Theology as well as the Chair of CGU’s Faculty Executive Committee.

Dr. Arguelles’ theoretical interests in the political economy and the spirituality of everyday life and her commitment to social and ecological justice and animal rights and welfare were shaped by her experiences in the Cuban socialist revolution and her studies with Buddhist teachers in India, Japan, Thailand, and Burma, and with a Chinese Qi-Qong master. Dr. Arguelles has also been influenced by her work with refugees and indigenous peoples around the world and by growing up in an extended family system in the Caribbean. In particular, her life experiences in non-advanced industrial parts of the world have greatly contributed to her work in narrative research and storytelling pedagogy.

Dr. Arguelles has also done community, labor, and environmental organizing work in Montreal, New York, Miami, Florida, and in US-Mexico border cities. In addition, she has spent considerable time involved as a psychotherapist with people living with HIV/AIDS, survivors of political and family torture, and with women of color and sexual minorities. Dr. Arguelles was Director of Research for the Ministry of Human Resources in British Columbia where she developed and implemented action research techniques for the evaluation of a variety of social and economic programs.

Until recently, Dr. Arguelles occupied the MacArthur Chair in Women Studies at Pitzer College. She has also taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of New Mexico, Arizona State University, the University of Waterloo (Ontario), UCLA, and Loyola College (Montreal). She has served as a consultant to the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the National Institutes of Health, the Citizenship Branch of the Canadian State Department, Tomas Rivera Institute, and AIDS Project, Los Angeles, among many governmental, private, and non-profit associations. Her work has been published in academic and popular journals around the world, and she has received many awards and citations for her research and humanitarian work, including the Golden Handshake Award from the Boys and Girls Club in Pomona and the 2004 Women of Achievement Award from the YWCA.  She continues to receive many grants from private and public funders for her community-based research projects.

Dr. Arguelles has sat on the boards of many activist, non-profit agencies including One Stop Immigration, one of the largest grassroots immigrant advocacy agencies in the U.S., and of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She is on the advisory or editorial boards of Sexualities (UK), Multicultural Social Work, Journal of Chicana Studies, and Latino Studies.

Dr. Arguelles teaches courses and advises students working in immigrant, refugee and community studies, environmental education, the study of genders and sexualities, radical democratic pedagogy, narrative and focus group research, political economy, and eastern and grassroots spiritualities and community informatics. She also recently developed an animal welfare and education program in South India.

Selected recent published work and presentations (from more recent to less recent)

• Family Economic Success Among Latinos in Los Angeles County:  A Narrative Case Study (with Tessa Hicks and Tom Dolan).  Report Submitted to the Los Angeles Children's Council.  Los Angeles, June 15, 2007.
• Organic Inquiry in the Classroom:  Working With a Holistic Observation Protocol (with Laurie Schroeder).  Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 2007.
• Impact of High-Stakes Testing on the Emotional Well-Being of Teachers:  A Visual Narrative (with Alane Daughterty and Laurie Schroeder). Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 2007.
• Working with Teachers and Homeless Persons. Paper presented to the International Conference on Education, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 9, 2007.  Published in Conference Proceedings.
• Normative and Socio-Political Questions of the AAUP "7 Year Rule" as Applied to a Contingent Faculty Member:  A Case Study.  Paper presented to the International Conference on Education, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 8, 2007.  Published in Conference Proceedings.
• La Nueva Jihad (with Jorge Erdely). Mexico DF:  Mexican Academy for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2003.
• Cults and Crime: Latin American Perspectives, AFF Conference, Chapman University, Orange County, June 2, 2003.
• Cults and Human Trafficking in the U.S. and Mexico Border, Keynote Panel Address, American Family Foundation and Cultic Studies, Annual Meeting, Edmonton, Canada, June 2003.
• The Heart in Holistic Education (with Rollin McCraty and Robert A. Rees).  Encounter:  Education for Meaning and Social Justice, Vol. 16, No. 3, Autumn 2003, pp. 13 – 21.
• La Nueva Jihad: Problemas Teóricos y de Percepción (The New Jihad: Theoretical and Perceptual Problems – with Jorge Erdely), Revista Académica Para el Estudio de las Religiones, Mexico, DF, 2002.
• Editor, Special Issue on Buddhism in Las Americas, Turning Wheel, The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism, Winter 2000-01.
• How Do We Live, Learn, and Die? In John P. Miller (Editor), Nurturing Wholeness, Foundation for Educational Renewal, 2001.
• Workshop on Pedagogies for Oppressors, Holistic Learning Conference, Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education (Toronto, Canada), October 2001.
• Panel presentation on La Luz del Mundo: Origins, Development and State Relationships of a Mexican Transnational Religious Organization. American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting (Denver, CO), November 2001.
• Colloquia on Between Renunciation and Struggle: Conversations on the World We Must Leave, Center for Process Studies, Claremont School of Theology, December 2001.
• The Story of a Charter School Closure (with Susan L. Flynn) Paths of Learning Journal, Spring 2000.

Forthcoming publications

• La Faz Social de Un Huracan:  Un Modelo de Opresions, Turismo, y Lucha en Cancun, in Genero en La Epoca de la Globalizacion:  Mirades desde el Mundo Maya, Mexico:  Plaza y Valdez (with Martha Barcenas). 
• The Testament of No Inheritance (monograph with Marie Sandy).
• Internal Disarmament (with Anne Rivero), in Hilda Baldoquin (Editor), Voices of the New Buddhism, Parallax Press, forthcoming in Fall 2004.
• Challenges to Conventional Schooling (with Sam Crowell), submitted to Occasional Papers in Process Education.
• Ivan Illich in a 21^st Century Teacher Education Classroom (with Sam Crowell), Proceedings of a conference on The Life and Work of Ivan Illich, Pitzer College

Projects

• Community Informatics joint Education courses and research with the School of Information Sciences at CGU.
• Institute of HeartMath Dr. Arguelles is Co-principal investigator, Dr. David Drew is Senior Researcher, and twelve of School of Educational Study doctoral students are research associates in a national congressionally funded intervention and research project to improve student achievement.
• Ontario Community University Partnership: Joint project of CGU and Pitzer College:
• Dr. Arguelles is member of the board of directors and author of a monograph on religious terrorism of a global organization headquartered in Mexico DF called Centro de Informacion sobre Sectas, Religiones, y Nuevos Movimientos Religiosos. Several of School of Educational Study doctoral students have participated and are participating in binational research work on immigrant religious practices.