LACS Conference “Resiliencia desde América Latina y el Caribe: Crisis, Resistance, and Adaptation” Research Symposium

Friday, February 16 – 4:30pm-6:30pm, G08 Uris Hall. Reception to follow from 6:30-7:30pm, Baker Portico, Physical Sciences Building | Saturday February 17, 2023 – 9:00am-4:30pm (breakfast available at 8:30am) G08 Uris Hall

Confronted by the ongoing consequences of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperial extraction, and more recently by the failed promises of global liberal democracy and political revolution, Latin American and Caribbean communities have created variegated landscapes and movements of crisis, resistance, and adaptation. Actors across Latin America and the Caribbean continue to act creatively to envision, enact, and experiment with a panoply of solutions, resistance strategies, and pre-figurative alternatives. Throughout history, and through alternative practices of community and kinship, art and performance, climate justice, technology, and a myriad of other examples, the friction generated during social, cultural, and economic predicaments has fueled healing processes for reconstruction and rebirth.

This symposium creates more spaces to discuss these pivotal and continuing cycles of crisis and adaptation. Above all, narratives and histories of Latin American and Caribbean resilience underscore the significant global role that these regions have had protecting and advocating for the health and well-being of their communities and the shared ecosphere in the afterglow of crises relating to our rapidly changing climate, economies, and politics, among others. Forms of resistance and adaptation, broadly construed, are denoted by the effort to transform fundamentally the material and ideological conditions of quotidian existence. To rethink through our current moment as connecting with our past and future, we invite the Cornell community to think through some of the most salient practices and theories that index forms of resistance and adaptation during times of crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean.

LACS Research Symposium 2024 Schedule

Friday, February 16, 2024, 4:30pm – 7:30pm (G08 Uris Hall) Welcome & Overview

Land Acknowledgment

LACS Director, Ernesto Bassi

LACS Graduate Fellows, Amanda Vilchez

5:00 – 5:45 pm Ecuador and Mexico Undergraduate Internship Panel

• Jenna Ceraso : Urban Gardens and Milpa Systems in the Patzcuaro, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

• Nicole Collins: Citizen Science/Connection, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador

• Katherine Esterl; The rights of nature as a legal philosophy with Prof. David Cordero-Heredia at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

5:45 – 6:30 pm Politics of Sustainable Development Course : Panelists: Sophia Caporusso, Sammie Engel, Melanie Harster, Willow Lewis, Francesca Saenz

6:30 – 7:30 pm Reception and music performance by “Mesa para cinco” Location: Baker Portico del Physical Sciences Building

Saturday, February 17, 2023 9:00am-4:30pm (G08 Uris Hall) 8:30 – 9:00 am Continental Breakfast Available

9:00 – 10:15am Environmental Health Politics: Knowledge Production and Mediated Spatial Practices. Moderator: Malembe Dumont Copero

Panelists: Piergianna Mazzona, Clippings on Malaria: Spatial History of a Sanitarian Imagination

Javier Amir Hurtado, Panama’s Mining Industries and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor conservation

Alex Nading, Toxic Media and Kidney Disease in the Nicaraguan Sugarcane Zone

Alonso Alegre Bravo, Rethinking the Role of Access to Electricity Indicators in Latin America: Towards Energy Justice

10:15 – 10:30am Coffee Break

10:30 am – 11:30 pm History, Colonialism, and Alternative Futurities. Moderator: Leonardo Santamaria-Montero

Panelists: Naveen Sharma, Specters of Peru: Understanding Mariategui's Vision of a Socialist Peru through the Ayllu, Karl Marx, and Jacque Derrida

Maria Paula Corredor Acosta, Atlantic Seascapes Project/Archivo digital de historia marítima

Sofia Meadows-Muriel, Evolving Puerto Rican Subjectivities: the Geographic Meanings and Possibilities of an Unsettled Nonsovereign Identities

11:30 am – 12:30 pm Remapping Conflict and Solidarity: Land, Labor, and Resistance. Moderator: Steven McCutcheon Rubio

Panelists: Natalia Correa Sánchez, Peasant Resistance against Conservation Labor: Territorialization Processes for Natural Conservation in Tierralta (Colombia)

Stefan Ivanovski, Tech Workers Unite: A Comparative Study of Cooperative Initiatives in Argentina and the UK

Sebastian Restrepo Rodriguez, Land Census, Rights, and the Peace Process in Colombia

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Lunch

1:30 – 2:45 pm Material and Non-Material Culture: Creativity, Reclamation, and Sovereignty. Moderator: Juliana Fagua Arias

Panelists: John Cotrina, Cultures & Sustainability in the Peruvian Andes

Isabel Padilla, “Si Tu No Sabe Kokobalé” and The Reclamation of Collective Memory as a Praxis of Liberation

Hannah Claire Toombs, Re-Capturing Indigenous Craft “Tradition”: Documenting and Interpreting Lenca Pottery Practice through a Collaborative PhotoVoice Project

Leonardo Santamaria-Montero, Material Culture and Visual Sovereignty in the K’iche’ Maya Uprising of Totonicapán, Guatemala (1820)

2:45 – 3:00 pm Coffee Break

3:00 – 4:15pm Democratic Processes and Social Dynamics. Moderator: María Corredor

Panelists: Rocío Salas Lewin, Constitutional Referendums in Chile: Voluntary vs. Compulsory Voting

David Cordero-Heredia and Jaime Ortiz Pachar, Setting the Judicial Agenda of the Constitutional Court in Ecuador

Nikky Suarez, “Feminist Decolonization Frameworks Mobilize Palestinian Indigenous Narratives: Lina Meruane’s Palestina en Pedazos Reframes Ancestral Trauma Healing”

4:15 – 4:30pm Closing words