Seminars

In the Anglo-American world, the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) is usually framed as a bungled dress rehearsal for mid-century Europe’s headlining act: the Second World War. But the ties of kin, faith, culture, and commerce connecting the Hispanophone world meant that Latin Americans experienced the War more intimately, and its relevance to their own struggles over land, Church, labor, and democratization — indeed, over the legacies of the feudal socioeconomic structures established, there as across the Atlantic, under imperial Spain — long outlasted the Republic’s fall. This paper takes stock of how the Spanish Civil War functioned in Cold War-era Latin America as what Paco Ignacio Taibo II called “la gran herida,” or the “great wound."

In the late 18th century Cuba became a prime producer of sugar and the demand for labor surged stimulating the massive importation of Africans as slave labor. By the mid-nineteenth century it was estimated that half the population of the island were descendants of Africans. This had enormous impact on Cuban culture and society. Dr. Franklin W. Knight, emeritus professor of Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Lillian Guerra Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History at the University of Florida will explore the legacies of slavery in Cuba.

Despite the globally promoted idea of transitional justice (TJ) as a solution to past conflict (Teitel 2003), little is known about how TJ processes are incorporated within the education sector and how the material they generate is used for broader pedagogical purposes. Only in recent years have scholars begun to examine the crucial function that education systems can play in the aftermath of a violent conflict to address broader structural inequalities and discrimination linked to underlying causes of a country’s conflict (see Bellino, Paulson, and Worden 2017; Cole 2007; Davies 2017; Ramirez-Barat and Duthie 2016; Russell et. al. 2024). We draw on the case of Colombia, which signed a peace agreement in 2016 after more than five decades of armed conflict and massive internal displacement, to analyze how TJ processes are incorporated within the education system. To understand how schools, students, and teachers are navigating lessons about justice, peace, and violence in Colombia, this study focuses on youth voices—capturing their experiences and opinions across Bogotá/Cundinamarca, Antioquia, and Norte de Santander. We analyze qualitative and quantitative data collected in 12 secondary schools during the 2022 academic year. Our research explores the following questions: To what extent have notions of TJ been implemented in educational institutions across urban and rural areas in diverse regions of Colombia? How do students and teachers understand and engage with concepts related to TJ and peacebuilding? We argue that the relationship between education and TJ is complex and multifaceted, where students not only learn about TJ content but also where education and schools promote TJ ideals. Understanding how students and teachers engage with TJ concepts in the classroom has important implications for promoting long-term sustainable peace and social cohesion in post-conflict contexts.

In this talk, Eden Medina, Hugo Palmarola, and Pedro Ignacio Alonso will discuss the recent exhibition they curated, How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design, that opened at the Centro Cultural La Moneda to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup. The exhibition included the first full-scale, functional reconstruction of the cybernetic operations room from Project Cybersyn, an initiative begun by the socialist government of Salvador Allende to improve the management of the Chilean economy through new data, communication, and computational capabilities. This talk will share the history of Project Cybersyn, how interpretations of this history have changed over time, and how the reconstruction of the room has furthered historical understandings of the project and its context. It will also discuss the process of reconstructing the operations room for public display, how the history of Project Cybersyn forms part of a larger story of Chile bringing together design, democracy, and socialism, and how these stories of design are shaping public memory of the Allende period fifty-years after the military coup took place.

The eruption of China into Latin America is one of the most surprising and important changes of the 21st century. Professor Barbara Stallings was one of the first US experts on Latin America to realize its significance and to study it. Unlike most US experts she has lived and taught in China, Latin America, and the US. She has also researched and written some of the best accounts and analyses of China and Latin America. Her performance as a Speaker is not to be missed.

Discourses on racialization throughout the Americas are often described in opposition to each other: U.S. racial understandings are often understood into the Black/white binary; in comparison, Latin American racial formations are placed into a spectrum of racial identifications. However, this configuration crumbles through conversations on lived experience, embodiment, and crossings across spatiotemporal terrain. Utilizing ethnographic and archival work, I ask: How do Black/Indigenous understandings of relation interrupt not only the (re)production of dichotomous spatial-racial logics but also present us with an alternative way of understanding race throughout the hemisphere?