CCONCHAS: A Communitarian Territorial Practice of Quechua Women in the Andes

Speaker: Katherin Tairo-Quispe

Date: February 14, 2025
Time: 10:00am
Address: Global Education Center, Room 2008/2010

As part of the Speaker Series on Latin America and the Caribbean, Professor Katherin Tairo-Quispe from the University of Texas at Austin, will present her research on Cconchas as a communitarian territorial practice of Quechua women in the Andes Mountains. As a Quechua scholar, she focuses on traditional earth ovens, known as cconchas by Quechua people in the Peruvian Andes, asking how they can be understood through the concept of Sumaq Kawsay (Buen Vivir in Spanish, well-being in English).

Campus Life Experience Credit is available.

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Dissident Peace: Autonomous struggles and the State in Colombia

Speaker: Anthony Dest

Date: February 7, 2025
Time: 3:30pm
Address: Room 220, Carolina Hall

As part of the Institute for the Study of the America’s Speaker Series on Latin America and the Caribbean, Anthony Dest will present his research on violence and peace struggles in Colombia. Anonthy Dest is a current Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the Lehman College of CUNY.

Anthony Dest is committed to supporting movements for social justice and liberation. His teaching, research, and writing explores the contours of violence and racism in Latin America. He earned his PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and his bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds a graduate certificate in Armed Conflict & Peace from La Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His dissertation, After the War: Violence and Resistance in Colombia, was recognized as the Best Dissertation of 2019 by the Peace and Justice Studies Association. His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.

Campus Life Experience credit is available.

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Migration and Human Rights over the Past Decade in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras

Speaker: Elizabeth Kennedy

Date: January 29, 2025
Time: 3:35pm
Address: Room 2008/2010 Global Education Center

As part of the Institute for the Study of the America’s Speaker Series on Latin America and the Caribbean, Elizabeth Kennedy will present her migration and human rights research over the past decade in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Elizabeth is a current Fulbright Scholar at El Salvador Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública de la Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas. 

Campus Life Experience credit is available.

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Women’s Solidarity at the Intersection of a Masculinist Peace in El Salvador

Speaker: Elizabeth Velásquez

Date: January 23, 2025
Time: 3:35pm
Address: Room 2008, Global Education Center

Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada (Department of Latina/Latino Studies University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is a socio-cultural anthropologist specializing in intersectional justice and violence, gender relations, and racialization in Latin America, with a focus on El Salvador. She earned her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Through her work on the gendered dynamics of grassroots peacemaking, Velásquez Estrada examines the central paradox of male gang members who simultaneously position themselves as purveyors of violence and peacemakers. Using intersectionality as an analytical lens, her work specifically traces how women relatives of male gang members engage in a complex politics of solidarity with their relatives’ peacemaking efforts and explores the layered politics of women’s demands for intersectional justice to transition Salvadoran society from conflict to peace.

Dr. Velásquez Estrada’s research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship: Gender Justice in the Era of Human Rights, and the National Science Foundation: Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She is a 2024-25 National Humanities Center Fellow.

Campus Life Experience Credit is available.

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A History of Dispossession in Three Acts: Agrarian Conflict and Migration in the Bajo Aguan Region, Honduras

Speaker: Andrés León Araya

Date: March 3, 2025
Time: 6 PM
Address: Global Education Center 1005

Following the story of a single family, and their journey within Honduras and beyond, this talk explores some of the root causes of the outmigration of rural Hondurans. It analyzes the ways in which the agrarian reform in Honduras took a set of allegedly “unruly” peasants from different parts of the country and turned them into a disciplined group of palm oil producers in the Bajo Aguan region in the country’s North Coast, unleashing in the process a set of forces that explain both the recent boom of palm oil production and drug trafficking in the region, as well as the flows of migration towards the United States.

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The Consequences of War: Blackness, Space, and the Guatemalan Nation-State

Speaker: Daisy Guzman Nunez

Date: January 28, 2025
Time: 6:00 PM
Address: Zoom

Garifuna scholar Dr. Guzman presents on migration and gender politics during the Guatemalan Civil War. Drawing on the perspectives of Garifuna women, she presents the rarely acknowledged gender racism and anti-Blackness in Guatemalan local and national policies.

This is an online event, so registration is required to receive link.

Register Here

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Dr. Carlos D. Altagracia Espada Lecture

Speaker: Dr. Carlos D. Altagracia Espada

Date: February 27, 2025
Time: 3:30 PM
Address: Mandela Auditorium

Dr. Carlos D. Altagracia Espada, Professor and Director of el Centro de Estudios Iberoamericanos at the Universidad de Puerto Rico will be a scholar-in-residence during the Carolina Jazz Festival from February 27- March 1st. On Thursday, February 27th, he will present his research as well as his book El cuerpo de la patria : intelectuales, imaginación geográfica y paisaje de la frontera en la República Dominicana durante la Era de Trujillo. Refreshments will be available afterwards.

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North Carolina Conference on Latin American Studies 

Date: February 22, 2025
Time: All Day

The Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the Latin American Studies Program at UNC Charlotte are pleased to announce the sixth annual North Carolina Conference on Latin American Studies (NC/CLAS). NC/CLAS 2025 will be an in-person event hosted by UNC Charlotte on February 21- 22, 2025. The program seeks to bring together scholars, specialists, and graduate students in North Carolina engaged in the diverse and multiple disciplinary domains dedicated to Latin American and Latino/a studies, past and present. 

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North Carolina Conference on Latin American Studies 

Date: February 21, 2024
Time: All Day

The Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University and the Latin American Studies Program at UNC Charlotte are pleased to announce the sixth annual North Carolina Conference on Latin American Studies (NC/CLAS). NC/CLAS 2025 will be an in-person event hosted by UNC Charlotte on February 21- 22, 2025. The program seeks to bring together scholars, specialists, and graduate students in North Carolina engaged in the diverse and multiple disciplinary domains dedicated to Latin American and Latino/a studies, past and present.

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Kullin Yaku: The living river and its relations in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Speaker: Fredy Grefa

Date: November 21, 2024
Time: 6:00PM
Address: Room 1005, Global Education Center

Fredy Rafael Grefa Andi is a first-generation Napo Runa in receiving a Ph.D. in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, in 2020. He received a MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a MA in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, he is a professor at the Sociology and International Relations Departments at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), Ecuador. His scholarship takes an environmental humanities approach and uses Indigenous concepts of human-environment relations, such as Sumak Kawsay and the Living Forest, to analyze how Amazonian peoples engage with, contest, and inform global conservation programs. He is a member of the OCKIL (Organization of Kichwa Communities of Loreto). He worked as environmental and community affairs supervisor in private oil companies in the Ecuadorian Amazon and as undersecretary for SENPLADES (Ecuadorian Planning Secretariat for Planning and Development) for the provinces of Pichincha, Napo and Orellana. He also served as Director of Environmental Management at Yachay Public Company and has collaborated with Indigenous grassroots organizations in the Ecuadorian Amazon, such as CONFENIAE and COICA.

Campus Life Experience Credit will be available.

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