Seminars:
Latin American Anthropology Seminar
Autumn 2020/Winter 2021
Latin American Anthropology Inaugural Seminar by Arturo Escobar, 29 October 2020
Techno-Politics of Brazil’s Forensic DNA Database and Its Promises, 9 February 2021
Missing Persons’ Families in the Peruvian Andes, 8 March 2021
Caribbean Studies Seminar
To be updated
Andean Studies Seminar
To be updated
Other Events:
Contemporary Latin American Writing: An Evening with Margarita García Robayo
Garibaldi in South America – An Exploration
Cultural Worlds of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America – Book Launch
Covid in the Southern Cone: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
Symposium Race, Activism and Space in Latin American Theory and Practice
The Supply Side of Populism
(Re)Imagining Belonging in Latin America and Beyond
Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_8eey3PF1Q&list=PL342E8ED303D81B03&index=3
Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iQkTjBitNY&list=PL342E8ED303D81B03&index=2
Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Workshop
Podcasts:
Cuerpa Política
Cuerpa Politica is a podcast series about reproductive health, politics and justice in Latin America, funded by the Centre for Latin American and Studies and co-hosted by, Dr Rebecca Ogden, Lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Kent and Dr R. Sanchez-Rivera, Postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Cuerpa Politica explores reproduction in Latin America through a series of conversations with activists, practitioners, artists, and researchers working in many different contexts. The episodes are available here.
- What’s so political about reproduction in Latin America? With Professor Laura Briggs
Professor Laura Briggs teaches and researches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is an authoritative voice in several fields relating to reproductive politics across the Americas. She is the author of several monographs, including the landmark 2003 book Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, the 2017 book How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, and most recently, Taking Children: A History of American Terror. In this broad ranging conversation, we discuss the many ways that reproduction shapes politics, and vice versa. Professor Briggs first describes how neoliberalism intensifies and distorts care labour. We also discuss the separation of children from their families by paramilitaries during the Guatemalan civil war, in processes that became monetised through the transnational adoption industry. The conversation also centres on how race science intersected with empire and reproductive control in Puerto Rico, and how historic dynamics weigh on contemporary debates surrounding reproduction - such as representations of the nation as a “welfare island”.
- Reproductive justice and activism: culture as context and tool. With Hannah S. Borboleta, Jaime Geligas and Alexandra-Marie Figueroa.
This episode is a recording of a roundtable discussion that took place during the ‘Cultural Politics of Reproduction in Latin America’ conference on Zoom, 14-15th January 2021. The roundtable was chaired by Dr Rachell Sánchez Rivera and included Hannah S. Borboleta, midwife, activist, and founder of the Morada Violeta clinic, Jaime Geligas, researcher and drag performance artist, Alexandra-Marie Figueroa, communications director of Taller Salud Puerto Rico. The panel discussed a range of topics, including links between masculinities and parenthood, the coloniality of reproductive rights struggles, machismo, cultural notions surrounding bodily autonomy and sexuality, controversies relating to midwifery models of care in Mexico, and intersectionality and positionality in activism. They also questioned how activists can include - through culture - those who have often been marginalised from reproductive justice questions, and what sort of transnational connections across the region are forged through activism relating to sexual and reproductive rights. This roundtable discussion is in Spanish and English.
- Why is Cuba’s birth rate falling? With Dr Elise Andaya
In this episode we talk to Dr Elise Andaya, a cultural medical anthropologist and associate professor at State University of New York in Albany. Dr Andaya’s research encompasses questions relating to reproductive health care, kinship, gender, and health policy and health inequalities in Cuba and the United States. In this conversation, we discuss the ethnographic work that led to her 2014 monograph, Conceiving Cuba: Women, Reproduction and the State in the Contemporary Era, the intersection of policy and reproductive choices in revolutionary Cuba, declining birth rates and her current research projects into COVID-era reproductive health disparities and the impact of health policy on pregnant service workers.
- The coloniality of reproductive violence, with Dr Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago
Dr Julieta Chaparro Buitrago is a member of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, or ReproSoc, at the University of Cambridge. Her research encompasses fertility studies, decolonial feminisms, reproductive justice, and Latin American studies. In this conversation, Dr Chaparro Buitrago discusses her research into questions of extravism (especially in Cajamarca, Peru), water politics and their fundamental relation to understandings of reproduction. This recent research responds to and extends a call for a multi-species reproductive justice - based on the notion of the interdependence of human, animal and land reproduction.
We also discuss the population control measures and the ‘gender-washing politics’ of President Alberto Fujimori’s administration in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- Abortion mobilities: the movement of people, pills, and information. With Dr Cordelia Freeman
Dr Cordelia Freeman is a political geographer, and lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her research considers the spatiality of reproductive health in Latin America, including how reproductive justice - particularly abortion access - is shaped in relation to borders and mobilities, and in the context of violence.
- Decolonising reproductive justice campaigns: art and activism. With Dr Céire Broderick
This episode features a conversation with Dr Céire Broderick, lecturer in Latin American Studies at University College Cork. Her research focuses on gendered approaches to Latin American Cultural Studies, with special interest in contemporary Chile. We discuss Dr Broderick’s current research into artistic responses in the campaigns for reproductive justice in Argentina, Chile, and Ireland in 2018, including the longer histories of reproductive politics, coloniality and the Catholic Church in these contexts, intersections of art and activism, and the radical possibilities of decolonial approaches to reproductive justice.
In this conversation, we discuss how abortion access figures as a dimension of reproductive justice in Latin America, how it is bound by legal and geographical boundaries but also transformed by the possibilities afforded by mobilities of pills and low-tech, responsive information. We also discuss the politics of abortion representation in popular culture and what’s next for abortion access fights in the region.
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https://twitter.com/CuerpaPolitica