Co-Sponsor: Jewish Studies Program

This presentation will explore various ways in which second generation Holocaust survivors in Argentina have witnessed the wound transmitted by their parents. This talk will consider issues of representation and agency while citing instances where second generation survivors have gained access to that which has been frozen in silence.

Annette Prekker Levine is Associate Professor at Ithaca College where she teaches courses on Latin American literature, theatre, and translation. She has written about issues of memory and representation associated with the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-83 and has been engaged in ongoing research about collective memory and injustice in the aftermath of the 1994 terrorist attack on the Jewish cultural center, the AMIA, in Buenos Aires. Her current ethnographic work is focused on the transmission of traumatic memory among second generation Holocaust survivors in Argentina.

In-person viewing: G01 Stimson Hall

Zoom Viewing upon registration:

Cosponsors: Africana Studies and Research Center/Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies (FGSS)

In this talk, Amarilys Estrella (Rice University) explores the everyday negotiations that Black Dominican women of Haitian descent within the Reconoci.do movement face as they fight against systemic racism in the Dominican Republic.

While noting the gendered dimensions of state sanctioned violence and denationalization policies, Estrella also interrogates the intimate spaces that Black women who form part of the movement inhabit, in which they are often confronted with gender-based violence. By engaging in local and transnational encounters where they share their stories and build with other women, Black Dominican women of Haitian descent are reimagining and transforming intimate relationships on a personal and communal level.

Idrissou Mora-Kpai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences and Studies at Ithaca College and an award winning filmmaker whose films have been screened world-wide at numerous prestigious festivals, such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna, Milano, Busan, Sheffield, and garnered many international accolades. Born in Benin, West Africa, Idrissou has made a name for himself with his social documentaries tackling post-colonial African societies, African migrations and diasporas. Idrissou’s most recent film, America Street explores the daily struggles of an African-American community in a quickly gentrifying historical black neighborhood in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, just after the 2015 Walter Scott killing.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Emily Vázquez Enríquez writes at the intersection of the environmental humanities and the fields of border and migration studies. Her first book project theorizes the concept of border biomes to think about the mutual entanglement between human and nonhuman entities in relation to border settings and migration flows in the Americas. In my work, she examines questions of ecopolitics in transnational settings, the relationships between migrants and border communities with border ecologies, and queries regarding the different forms of environmental racism faced by immigrants.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Joni Adamson is President's Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHI) at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She writes on the centrality of the environmental humanities to the sustainability sciences, the design of desirable futures, climate fiction and film, Indigenous literatures and scientific literacies, the rights of nature movement, and the food justice movement. Her research has been supported by many awards and grants, including the 2019 Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. She is the author and/or co-editor of eight books and special issues and 80 articles, chapters, reviews and blog posts which have been widely cited, reprinted, and translated into Mandarin and Spanish. She has been invited to keynote conferences and lecture in Australia, China, England, Italy, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and throughout the U.S. Her organizational activities helped lay the foundations for transnational environmental American Studies and the environmental humanities.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Rita Indiana Hernández is a Dominican writer, musician, and performer. In addition to her popularity as a singer-songwriter, she is widely regarded as one of the most important Dominican authors of her generation. Her viral music success has made Rita a household name in the Dominican Republic where she is popularly referred to as "La Montra" (the monster). Her literary career began in the 1990s with short works included in zines such as Vetas. Around the time she published her second novel, Papi, she began experimenting with musical and visual projects as part of different performance groups, such as Casifull and Miti Miti. Her popularity as a musician grew even more after the 2010 release of the album El juidero, recorded with her band Rita Indiana y los Misterios. She subsequently published two more novels, Nombres y animales (2013) and her science fiction experimental novel, La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle 2015). Her focus on dismantling mythologies and rebuilding from the rubble appears in her most recent novel, Made in Saturn (2020). She was also named one of the one hundred most influential Latino/a personalities by the Spanish newspaper El País. Daniel Alarcón describes her 2021 album "Mandinga Times" as “apocalyptic” in his New Yorker review; she calls it a songbook for the end of the world

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Grand Challenge Mellon Grant, and Department of Comparative Literature.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of the award-winning memoirs Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004), Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales, 2007). She won the 2007 Richard J. Margolis Award for Social Justice Reporting and edited Best Women’s Travel Writing (Travelers’ Tales, 2010). UNC Press published her latest book, All the Agents & Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands, in 2017. Griest co-founded the Youth Free Expression Network, an anti-censorship organization for teens that is a program of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) in New York City. She once logged in 45,000 miles on a 42-state journey across America, documenting history that is generally overlooked in classroom textbooks for a non-profit educational website called The Odyssey. She has been a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City since 2005, a member of PEN since 2008, a Macondista (of Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Workshop) since 2009, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters since 2013, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle since 2018. In 2015, she served as a literary ambassador to Venezuela and Colombia as part of the International Writing Program’s Lecture Tours, and in 2018, she became a live storyteller for The Moth.

Co-Sponsored by: LACS, Latina/o Studies Program, the Migrations Global Grand Challenge, and Department of Comparative Literature.

"Inquiry-Based Language Learning"
Christina Rocha
ACS Athens

This talk will focus on inquiry-based learning within the language classroom, more specifically WHY it is important as well as HOW we can successfully engage our students to ask more questions, sparking their curiosity and motivation to learn more about the language, culture, and people we teach about. Inquiry-based learning helps build intercultural communicative awareness and competence while fostering student agency and a sense of connection to our community through conscious global citizenship.

Bio: Christina Rocha has been teaching languages (ESL, Greek, French, and Spanish) since 1999. She started her career in the U.S. public school system before moving internationally; she currently teaches Spanish and ESL at the American Community Schools (ACS) in Athens, Greece. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics and Language and Communication with a research interest and focus on inquiry-based language learning and global citizenship. She has recently authored two chapters in the 2021 IGI publication on this topic in the Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model.

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, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.