Alejandra González Jiménez

Biography

Alejandra González Jiménez is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral dissertation entitled Volkswagen de México: The Car as National Fetish, ethnographically examines capitalism by looking at concrete and mundane car-related practices: the manufacturing, engineering, driving, and collecting of cars. Through these practices she elucidates the ways in which capitalism is continuously made, remade, and unmade in the everyday. She explores the intersections between capitalism and national projects of development, as well as how these two abstract processes are embedded in concrete social practices, aspirations, affective attachments, promises, and hopes. Alejandra is a Mellon Mays Fellow and holds the John Hope Franklin Dissertation Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society.