Faculty Resources

Abstract:

Those familiar with contemporary Haitian politics will know that those fomenting rebellion in Haiti today would not be met by the French military or the U.S. Marines, but rather by the United Nations’ so-called peacekeeping missions. These missions suppress the uprisings of the disenfranchised and work to make wealth redistribution impossible and unthinkable. This talk revisits two historic rebellions against the UN and explores the ideologies and aesthetics that uphold the violent hegemony of peace enacted by this institution. 

Bio:

Nathalie Batraville is an associate professor at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, where she teaches in the areas of Black feminisms, queer theory, and prison abolition. A scholar and artist, her work seeks to generate and illuminate frameworks that challenge both state violence and interpersonal violence. Her scholarship has appeared in scholarly publications such as Small Axe, The Journal of Haitian Studies, The CLR James Journal, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Tangence. Her first book, Disrupting Agency: Towards a Black Feminist Anarchism, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. In it, she rethinks abolitionist frameworks from a Black feminist anarchist perspective. Through her ceramic art practice, she explores storytelling, plant life, desire, and rebellion.

Abstract:

It is time to revisit dependency theory as one explanation of Latin American violence.  Analyses of Latin America’s role in global capitalism reveal that during the colonial and modern eras, Latin America was relegated to the production of raw materials for European industries, which then became manufactured goods sold in the Latin American market.  Here is the long history of trade imbalances, debt, and the rise of an entrenched elite class largely centered on agricultural production and not manufacturing.  The liberal constitutions of Latin America that emerged during the 19th century and are still presently influential did not alter this economic structure. Today’s paramilitary drug cartels are a curious continuation: They export at industrial scale a “finished product” that remains significantly rooted in the agricultural sector.

Bio:

Ralph Cintrón is professor emeritus of English and Latin American and Latino Studies and Senior Researcher at the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  During COVID he was LALS’s interim director. He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, honorable mention winner for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association, and a Fellow of the Rhetoric Society of America. He is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday as well as Democracy as Fetish.  He is also the co-editor of Culture, Catastrophe + Rhetoric and Co-Pi of 60 Years of Migration: Puerto Ricans in Chicagoland.  He is currently writing with a philosopher Natures and Their Cosmologies, a text about planetary heating inside modernity’s political economy.  In conjunction with this last project he is working with climate scientists on a $25 million grant funded through the Department of Energy to Argonne National Laboratory and UIC, and a $2 million grant funded by Mellon, Crossing Latinidades, which is working with Latino Studies programs at UC Irvine, UT Arlington, and UIC to map the experiences of local Latino communities under climate change.

Abstract:

The importance of documenting, remembering, and centering the many violences that occur across our societies is evident in how we relate our histories to our presents and futures. Such documentation serves to remind us of state-sanctioned and other actor-level violence, accidental and purposeful. Through the work of caleño artist and photographer Oscar Muñoz’s 2022 Invisibilia exhibit, I analyze his themes of presence/absence, memory/amnesia, and cohesion/fragmentation in how his photographs, sculptures, and other artworks document aspects of state, paramilitary, and FARC-related violence. Simultaneously recognizing the need to remember such violence and the desire to forget, Muñoz demonstrates the tensions residing within sedimented and fleeting memories that are blur private/public boundaries. As such, documenting violence in this way can illustrate the possibilities for democratic processes through the very act of remembering.

Bio:

Dr. Stacey Sowards teaches courses in communication theory, rhetorical theory, environmental communication, gender and communication, and intercultural communication. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2001.

Her research focuses on environmental, intercultural, and gender and communication in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Her dissertation was a study of environmental organizations in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and was funded by a J. William Fulbright grant in 2000-2001. In 2005, she received a Fulbright-Hays grant for further study in Indonesia. She speaks both Spanish and Indonesian.

Her work in communication and rhetoric has been published as book chapters and journal articles. Other research projects focus on cultural and gender representations, and appear in journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, Communication Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Communication Theory. Her book, on Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers, was published in 2019 with The University of Texas Press.Dr. Stacey K. Sowards served the department chair and a full professor in the department of communication and research fellow in the Sam Donaldson Center at the University of Texas at El Paso for many years before joining the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. 

Abstract:

This talk will first examine the current state of violence in Latin American democracies, focusing on state violence and crime. It will analyze both the region’s “anomalies” and the lessons to be learned from societal responses, while drawing connections to the U.S. Second, it will address a specific issue: gender violence in the Americas, focusing on Argentina and the U.S. Specifically, it will explore how activism and communication practices can raise awareness among citizens, drawing on interviews with feminist advocates, members of the public, and surveys conducted with the general population.

Bio:

María Celeste Wagner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania (2022; 2018), and a Licenciatura (B.A.) in Communication from Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, her home country. Celeste’s research focuses on media reception and influence surrounding social and political issues, particularly gender inequalities in the Americas. Methodologically, her work includes individual and group interviews, surveys, experiments, and comparative analysis. Her dissertation has been honored with four awards from the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. Her research has been published in the Journal of Communication, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Journalism, Latin American Perspectives, among others.