LAII PhD Colloquium
Friday, April 13, 2018 | 12:00 pm - 01:30 pm
Latin American and Iberian Institute
801 Yale Blvd NE (campus building #165)
About:
Join us for an afternoon with our LAII PhD Fellows, doctoral students from around campus whose work relates to Latin America, as they discuss their ongoing research.
José Castro-Sotomayor
Department of Communication and Journalism
Translating global nature: territoriality, environmental discourses, and ecocultural identities
In this study, Castro-Sotomayor explores the translation of global environmental discourses performed by La Gran Familia Awá Binacional (GFAB), one of the few transboundary indigenous organizations working along the border between Ecuador and Colombia. He focuses on the discourses of development, sustainability, and climate change, to understand the politics of nature embedded in environmental globalization.
María del Pilar File-Muriel
Department of Anthropology
Social construction of transformative spaces in Buenaventura
Through her dissertation research, File-Muriel looks at transnational relationships between activists, NGOs, and peace practitioners in Colombia/USA. In her talk, she will be sharing initial reflections from her fieldwork on transformative spaces of peace in Buenaventura, Colombia, which exemplify the creative power of citizens resisting local and global development and urbanization processes and highlight the contradictions in which peace activism and structural violence coexist in the most important port city of Colombia.
Annie Theodoropoulos
Department of Anthropology
“A Straight Line” to the Authentic: Crafting Orthodox Christian Tradition in Brazil’s Middle Class
This presentation examines the intersection of class and religion in the budding Brazilian Orthodox Church, a new religious organization founded by middle-class converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. As one priest explained, finding Orthodox tradition was like accessing “a straight line” (uma linha direita) to the authentic, original Church. Theodoropoulos’ research asks how aligning with the “authentic tradition” (tradição verdadeira) of Orthodoxy is constructed and performed, and explores the primacy of authenticity for middle-class faithful.
Notes:
This event is free and open to the public.
