Join the CMS Borders research group for a book talk on Urban Indigenous Assemblages on November 5, from 4:30 to 6:00 PM in IKBLC, Dodson Room (302).
Light refreshments will be provided.
This event is co-sponsored by the UBC Latin American Studies.
Abstract
Over the past two decades, Latin American politicians and activists have reckoned with their nations’ histories of racism, forced displacement of native peoples, and inequality by acknowledging Indigenous communities as peoples preexisting the modern states. In Argentina—a nation long fixated on presenting itself as “white” and “European”—this shift has been dramatic. After decades of erasure and racism toward Indigenous peoples, Argentinian civil society is identifying Indigenous groups as not just an element from the past, but as nations central to the country’s culturally plural and multiracial identity.
This event will take place during Latin American Heritage Month. Dr. Vivaldi will be in conversation with Dr. Riaño Alcalá and Dr. Beasley-Murray for 50 minutes, followed by a 45-minute audience Q&A.
Speakers
Dr. Ana Vivaldi’s interdisciplinary research brings politics of indigeneity and race into inquiries on the social production of space, mobilities, and embodiment. She is currently sessional Faculty in Anthropology and Sociology at The University of British Columbia. Through the use of ethnographic and visual methodologies, her research clarifies questions surrounding indigenous sovereignties and emergent forms of urban conviviality, in particular, the way mobility among marginalized populations shapes social and spatial assemblages that challenge subordination. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at UBC in 2016. Along with her research in Argentina, she has worked in popular education, in collaboration with indigenous organizations, the environmental movement, and in Museum interpretation.
Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is a professor at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and co-lead of the Transformative Memory International Network. Dr. Riaño is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar and an ethnographer/labourer of memory work. She is currently working on three large research projects, Transformative Memory: An International Network (a SSHRC Partnership Grant with Erin Baines, UBC); Exhumations and Burial in Colombia and A Place of Memory (with the Committee of Victims of the Middle Atrato River) and Sacred Responsibilities to Water. Indigenous Knowledge Exchanges, Canada-Colombia (with Aimée Craft, University of Ottawa).
Dr. Jon Beasley-Murray is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, in the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies and in the Arts One program. He chairs UBC’s program in Latin American Studies and is involved in Arts One Digital. Dr. Beasley-Murray’s book, Posthegemony, was published by the University of Minnesota Press and won honorable mention in the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for “an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.” His current book project includes “American Ruins,” which examines the significance of six ruined sites from Alberta, Canada, to Santiago de Chile.
