Educator, youth worker, and artist at heart, Chelsea Viteri was born and raised in Quito, Ecuador. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, majoring in Theater Arts and minoring in International Development. Her master's degree is in Community Development and Planning.
A community organizer for over ten years, Chelsea has collaborated with diverse communities in both Ecuador and the United States. In her work, she has utilized artistic expression, including theatre of the oppressed, music, poetry, and documentaries as means of collective empowerment and creative conflict transformation. Most recently, she served as Resident Director and Instructor for Pachaysana, an Ecuadorean non-profit focused on intercultural exchange and study abroad that seeks to decolonize education and reimagine international education. As a scholar-practitioner, Chelsea is also active as a researcher. Her earlier work focused on the gendered impacts of extractive industries in communities of Latin America. Lately, her focus has shifted to transformative justice, epistemic pluralism, and gender dynamics in the context of intercultural and organizational spaces.
Within the Global Studies Program, she is an instructor for our Ampersand First-Year Program, the Global Citizenship Program (GCP), and the staff advisor for the university's international honor society, Sigma Iota Rho (SIR). Additionally, she coordinates the Global Studies student programming, which includes speaker series events, participatory art exhibits, multi-day conferences, and much more. Please get in touch with Chelsea if you are interested in any of our programs or if you are interested in collaborating with Global Studies to host an event.
Publications:
"Re-storying participatory action research: a narrative approach to challenging epistemic violence in community development." with Daniel Bryan, in A. Falcon & S. Stoecker (Eds.) Handbook on Participatory Action Research and Community Development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022.
"Reimagining Risk Management: Decolonizing Crisis Response Through Holistic Partnership Building in Education Abroad" Bryan, D., Viteri, C., Murphy, C., Csoman, K., Pilaquinga Llulluna , E., & McGrath, E. 2022. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 34(3), 44–72. https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v34i3.672
