Outreach Coordinator, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
About
Chris Jensen is the community outreach coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan’s International Institute. Chris is currently a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Utah with a disciplinary focus on comparative politics, political theory, and public administration, where he also received a master’s degree in public administration with an emphasis in Latin American Studies in 2016. Also, Chris holds a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a focus on international development and a regional concentration in Latin America from California State University, Long Beach.
After spending years volunteering in the Atacama region of Chile, Chris worked as an international project director in the INGO sector, serving marginalized communities in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. With a diverse project management portfolio that included local neighborhood associations, regional government contracts, and multilateral agreements with international and faith-based organizations, he has a passion for connecting people through collaborative partnerships. At the University of Utah, Chris managed a co-curricular community-engaged learning program developing campus-community partnerships, taught courses in community project design, undergraduate leadership, as well as comparative and Latin American politics, and served as faculty director for the University of Utah’s service-learning study abroad program to Havana, Cuba for 2016 and 2017 fall semesters.
Since 2015, he has been conducting political ethnographical work in Cuba with a number of autonomous community-based organizations which work on a variety of social justice issues on the island. Given the constraints of the global pandemic, Chris' current dissertation research has shifted to studying critical online discourses among independent leftist bloggers in Cuba.
His most recent awards have been as an Administrative Theory and Praxis Graduate Fellow (2019-2020) and a Tinker Foundation Dissertation Research Grantee (2020-2021).
