Co-sponsored by: History of Art Department

With its striking stonework, dramatically sited buildings, and impressive terraces cascading down steep mountainsides, Inca architecture has fascinated visitors to the Andes for centuries. Yet, this lithic architecture was only one part of the complex built environment of the Inca. In this talk, Nair explores how issues of permanence and ephemerality were crucial to Inca building practices and reveal the critical role gender played in creating and giving meaning to place.

Stella Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes. Nair’s book, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas Press, 2015), examines the sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture to impose their authority. She has also published (with Jean-Pierre Protzen), The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2013), which explores one of the world’s most artful and sophisticated carving traditions.

Nair has received numerous research grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Association, the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. More recently, Nair was awarded a Rome Prize by the American Academy of Rome and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Currently, Nair directs the Andean Laboratory and the Architecture laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

In this talk, conceptual artist Violette Bule in conversation with Irina R. Troconis (Department of Romance Studies) will discuss a series of Bule’s works that engage with the political, social, and cultural dimensions of migration, both in the context of Venezuela’s current migration crisis and in the broader context of Latin American migration. Reflecting on issues such as identity anxiety, jurisdiction, territoriality, nationality, identification, bureaucratic performance, concentric borders, bi-dimensionality, and transitoriality, the talk will analyze the intersections of identity and territory that materialize as shared experiences of living and belonging through art practices.

Violette Bule is a Venezuelan-Lebanese conceptual artist and an MFA candidate at the University of Houston. Her work engages with a wide variety of topics—migration, identity, memory, violence, community engagement, digital technologies, the politics of space, and the social and political reality of contemporary Venezuela—and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was selected for the 11 Installations Artist Project founded by MOCA, Art League, and HAA, Houston, Texas. She was also the recipient of a SOMA SUMMER - MEXICO CITY grant awarded by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and of the first artist residency awarded by Cornell’s Romance Studies Department.

Co-Sponsor: Romance Studies Department

This interactive talk will serve as an introduction to the activist forms that make up the arsenal of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO): a collection of games, techniques, and exercises using theatre as a vehicle for personal, political, and social change. Originally developed in Brazil by theatre innovator Augusto Boal, TO was inspired in part by the educational theories of Paulo Freire, and employed with peasants and workers throughout Latin America. Today, the techniques are used internationally and have been adapted by countless companies and practitioners. Join us to learn about TO’s foundational theories, its growth in Latin America and its practice in the United States, along with some of TO’s most well-known exercises.

In celebration of Halloween: Coffee, Cider, and Donuts served.

Alexander Santiago-Jirau (he/him/his) is Director of Education at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW). In this role, he oversees all of NYTW’s education and engagement initiatives, including the Mind the Gap (MTG) intergenerational theatre program, student matinees, in-school teaching artist residencies, after-school programs, master classes, administrative fellowships, and community-based programs. A Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner who studied and worked with Augusto Boal, Alex has facilitated many workshops throughout his career, particularly with youth, educators and immigrant communities. He is Past-President of the Board of Directors of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc., a national organization devoted to the work of liberatory educators, activists, artists, and community organizers, and a current board member for the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, a service organization for arts education practitioners.

Alex has presented his work at numerous conferences and his writing has appeared in The Indypendent, TYA Today, The Cross Border Project Blog (Spain), “Come Closer”: Critical Perspectives on Theatre of the Oppressed, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed, and Applied Theatre with Youth: Education, Engagement, Activism. He has taught Latin American and Latinx Theatre at Drew University and currently teaches TO for the Department of Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Educational Theatre program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He holds a BS in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University and an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU Steinhardt.

Change in Time to 4:30pm and room to 312 Uris Hall.

This talk discusses identity formation in the Andean world through a study of the Quechua suffix -ntin/ -nintin. It also raises the suffix’s broader philosophical and political ramifications for questions of unity, collectivity, and the relationship between part and whole.

Vanessa Gubbins is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell.

This event is co-sponsored with LACS by the Cornell University and Ithaca College Jewish Studies.

Marjorie Agosin will speak about the complexities of writing about her own family. Mirroring the history of displacement of Jews across the world and especially in Latin America, she will highlight coexistence with SS who found refuge in Jews south of Chile, a small and vulnerable Jewish community in the region. Marjorie will also discuss some writers in LA that have engaged in memoir writing.

Marjorie Agosin is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities. She is an award-winning poet, memoirist, and Human Rights activist. Her creative work is inspired by the theme of social justice as well as the pursuit of remembrance and the memorialization of traumatic historical events both in the Americas and in Europe. She has written about the Holocaust through the portrayal of Anne Frank as well as the history of Bosnian women during the siege of Sarajevo. Marjorie is also a literary scholar whose work has focused on major writers such as Pablo Neruda, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Gabriela Mistral. She has done extensive research and written about the role of women in Latin America during authoritarian regimes in the seventies and eighties. One of her works, the Arpilleras of Chile, has been a pioneer work on this subject. In her career, Marjorie has written essays, autobiographical memoirs, and a young adult novel with a unified theme of the pursuit of social justice and human rights.

Marjorie is a recipient of the Pura Belpre award, the Gabriela Mistral award for life achievement issued by the Chilean government, and the United Nations Leadership award.

Zoom link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DygtSQ8YSNKfE1Hwa_FvDQ

In 2008, the people of Ecuador approved a new constitution that establishes that nature has rights. The rights of nature (RoN) are the product of a biocentric conception defending nature's intrinsic value. The RoN differs from the environmental law because it uses a different approach to the tolerable limits of the impact of human activity. While environmental law is the compromise between business and conservation, RoN creates scientific redlines based on the capability of the ecosystems to self-regenerate. If there is a species extinction risk or permanent damage to the ecosystem cycle, the risky activity should be forbidden.

How are RoN working after ten years? Do legal institutions play the expected role in protecting nature? Does an individual member of a species have rights? Or is the whole specie the right holder? Is it the entire ecosystem? Or is the earth entitled to the rights? The Constitutional Court of Ecuador has been discussing these questions in its jurisprudence for the last three years. We will analyze those decisions that recognize the personhood of rivers and forests and their implications on the broader discussion about sustainability, climate change, and development. Finally, we will discuss the enforceability and impact of the aforementioned jurisprudence in Ecuador.

David Cordero-Heredia is an Associate Professor of Law at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE). He has been visiting professor at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB), Universidad de las Americas (UDLA) and Universidad del Azuay (UDA).

David has represented indigenous peoples and individuals against Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court HR). The cases include a vast number of topics, including forced disappearances, torture, illegal detentions, massacres, migrants' rights, indigenous peoples' rights, access to free health services, force eviction, mass incarceration, oil & mining industries, fair trial, police brutality, and rights of nature.

Professor Cordero has an LL.B. from PUCE, master's degrees from UASB and Universidad de Alcala, and an LL.M. and a JSD from Cornell University. He is a visiting scholar in Cornell's Latin American and Caribbean Studies program (LACS).

How can we think about the relationship between cinema and the environment beyond the realm of representation? Building off the "material turn" in media studies, which attends to the substances that compose media, in this talk I explore Mexican cinema through a material lens. As an industry that has long been funded by state oil revenue, what would it mean to decarbonize Mexican cinema? To get at this question, I spotlight recent efforts to disentangle cinema and oil by filmmakers and film distributors.

Carolyn Fornoff is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Romance Studies department. She has coedited two books in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).

Cosponsor: Romance Studies Department

Zoom Link Registration:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ydjJblhpSm6vEy09qxoN4A

"Antiracist Critical Literacy: Methodologies of the Oppressed for Language Education"
Claudia Holguín Mendoza
Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics, University of California, Riverside

In this presentation, Dr. Holguín Mendoza describes the design and implementation of a comprehensive critical literacy and Critical Language Awareness (CLA)-oriented Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) program that deconstructs and questions sociopolitical hierarchies, challenges the subordination of SHL students' linguistic practices, and elevates students' voices and agency. She underscores the importance of building critical SHL programs on three interrelated foundations: stakeholder engagement, curriculum, and assessment. A truly comprehensive critical literacy and CLA-oriented program must integrate critical teacher training with a wide stakeholder engagement that serves to build on strengths from across the institution and to position the SHL program as a promoter of Latinx student success. Sociolinguistic justice and antiracist transformation through literacy occur when we critically understand how language and sociocultural access and expertise are socially constructed. Finally, Dr. Holguín Mendoza describes assessment tools that have demonstrated how comprehensive critical literacy programs have proven to be a valuable model for language education and student empowerment.

Bio: Dr. Claudia Holguín Mendoza is an Associate Professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of California, Riverside. She specializes in the sociolinguistics of race in the Mexican borderlands and Greater Mexico as well as critical pedagogies for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language. She publishes in both English and Spanish and her work has appeared in journals such as International Multilingual Research Journal, Hispania, Studies in Hispanic & Lusophone Linguistics, Identities, and Frontera Norte.

This event will be held in person on campus (Goldwin Smith Hall G76) and will also be streamed live over Zoom (see link for registration details).

The talk is part of the 2022 Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning Fall Workshop titled Connecting Language Teaching and Social Justice: A Call for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

"Problem-Based Models for Language and Culture Instruction"
Stacey Margarita Johnson
Assistant Director at the Center for Teaching and Senior Lecturer of Spanish, Vanderbilt University

A problem-based approach to language instruction infuses the communicative classroom with current events, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary connections. Through a process of identifying a problem, gathering resources to understand the problem, and then working with a group to process and report on what they have learned, students acquire language as they learn about the world around them and engage deeply with others' perspectives. Although problem-based language learning can be used as the foundation of an entire course or program of study, this talk will emphasize how and why instructors can implement problem-based language learning right away through intentional, research-informed modifications to their existing plans.

Bio: Dr. Stacey M Johnson is a teacher of Spanish as well as language teaching methods and second language acquisition. Stacey is also a researcher, technology administrator, editor of the journal Spanish and Portuguese Review, and producer of the podcast We Teach Languages. Her academic interests include postsecondary language classroom practices, hybrid/blended instruction, professional development, and adult learning including transformative learning and critical pedagogy. Her first book, Hybrid Language Teaching in Practice: Perceptions, Reactions, and Results, co-authored with Berta Carrasco, was published in March 2015, and her second book, Adult Learning in the Language Classroom, came out later that same year. Stacey’s recent publications include a book chapter and a magazine article about collecting authentic resources and an article about social justice in the language classroom. Currently she is working on projects including: 1) her third book, co-authored with Claire Knowles with expected publication in 2022, about the potential of a problem-based model for language and culture instruction, and 2) an edited collection co-edited with Kelly Davidson and LJ Randolph titled How We Take Action: Social Justice in K-16 Language Classrooms. At Vanderbilt University, in addition to her role as the Assistant Director for Educational Technology in the Center for Teaching, Stacey also holds appointments as a Senior Lecturer of Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and as adjunct faculty in the English Language Learners program in Peabody College, and is Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Second Language Studies.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.