2023-24 Event Series

Black and white picture of Marisol de la Cadena with a cow

The 2023-2024 Academic Year has a full and diverse program of events. 

Events may be online via Zoom, in-person, or a hybrid of the two. 

New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Imagining Other Worlds

This academic year programming will focus on critics and intellectuals who, in their forms of writing and thinking, undo the divisions and separations between disciplines and genres, and between political action and intellectual engagement. In this practice of border/crossing, new languages and grammars can be imagined to signify other worlds to resist and oppose the imposed violence of colonial epistemes. These scholars, critics, and political actors offer a dynamism of the indeterminacy, inviting practices that bring together words and worlds. Each visit will have two components, a lecture and, the following day, a seminar led by the guest speaker with readings material available by those who sign up.

Fall 2023

Sep 21 | Marisol de la Cadena 

Marisol de la Cadena is an anthropologist working through what she calls “ontological openings,” interested in ethnographic concepts – those that blur the distinction between theory and the empirical because they are not without the latter.

Nov 9 | Maylei Blackwell

Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Activism

Maylei Blackwell is an Associate Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Women’s Studies Department, and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. Her research has two distinct, but interrelated trajectories that broadly analyze how women’s social movements in the U.S. and Mexico are shaped by questions of difference ­ factors such as race, indigeneity, class, sexuality or citizenship status ­ and how these differences impact the possibilities and challenges of transnational organizing.

Spring 2024

Mar TBA | Moira Millán

Moira Millán is an award-winning Mapuche author, screenwriter and activist from Argentina. She is a Weychafe (guardian, defender, warrior) in the Mapuche tradition and a leader in the movement to recover her people’s ancestral lands and the founder of the Movement of Indigenous Women for “Buen Vivir,” which advocates a way of life in harmony with nature.

TBA | Yina Jimenez Suriel

Yina Jiménez Suriel is a curator and researcher with a master’s degree in visual studies. Associate editor of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) Latin America and the Caribbean. She’s curator at large of the Caribbean Art Initiative.

Novedades/Lançamentos: New Scholarship @ Berkeley

This series will highlight new work from UC Berkeley scholars on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Fall 2023

Oct 5 | Laura J. Enriquez

Children of the Revolution: Violence, Inequality and Hope in Nicaraguan Migration

Laura J. Enríquez is Associate Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Professor in the UC Berkeley Sociology Department. Enríquez’s current project explores what happens when Latin Americans – most especially women – find themselves unable to improve their own and their family’s prospects in their home country.

Spring 2024

Feb 8 | Margaret Chowning 

Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940

Margaret Chowning is Professor and Sonne Chair in Latin American History in the History Department at UC Berkeley. Her research interests are Mexico, the late colonial period and nineteenth century, Women, Church, and Social and Economic History in Latin America. 

TBA | Juana María Rodríguez

Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex

Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Core faculty in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on racialized sexuality and gender; queer of color theory and activism; affect and aesthetics; technology and media arts; law and critical race theory; and Latinx and Caribbean literatures and cultures.

*Presented by the Social Studies Matrix. 

TBA | Lev Michael 

Diccionario Iquito-Castellano

Lev Michael is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the interplay of language structure and social activity, and explores the ways that social, political, and cultural processes both shape, and are shaped by, the structural dimensions of language.

Faculty and Student Series

Event series organized by Berkeley faculty and students, cosponsored by CLACS

CLACS Working Groups*

Language Revitalization

The Language Revitalization Working Group (LRWG), co-hosted by the Linguistics and Ethnic Studies departments, focuses on discussing theories, methodologies, and applications of language revitalization (LR) in a variety of world contexts.

Group Leaders: 

Tzintia Araceli Montaño Ramírez, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley.

Måsi Santos, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley.

Latin American and Caribbean Socionatures 

The Latin American and Caribbean Socionatures Working Group is an interdisciplinary community organized around the exploration of the histories, dynamics, and conflicts surrounding the co-constitution of nature-society across Latin America and its fluid boundaries.

Group Leaders: 

Maria Villalpando Paez, Ph.D. Candidate, Energy and Resources Program, UC Berkeley.

Jesús Alejandro García A., Ph.D. Candidate, ESPM, UC Berkeley.

Andrés Caicedo, Ph.D. Student, ESPM, UC Berkeley.

Sebastián Rubiano, Ph.D. Student, ESPM, UC Berkeley.

*Click here for more information on CLACS Working Group Grants

CLACS Co-Sponsored Event Series*

Latin America Media 

Oct 16 | Martina Broner 

Martina Broner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Dartmouth College.

Mar 4 | Paloma Duong

Paloma Duong, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

This series is cosponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media. 

Fotos Desaparecidas: Disparate Memories of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict

On the 20th anniversary of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, this event series focuses on the legacies of photographic archives documenting the country’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000).

According to the Final Report, of the nearly 70,000 people killed, 75% were Indigenous (the majority Quechua), and 40% were from the Andean region of Ayacucho. This series puts Quechua-speaking photographers from Ayacucho in dialogue with other artists, curators, and academics to discuss disparate memories of the internal armed conflict in the context of Peru’s current political crisis. The series consists of virtual conversations and hybrid exhibitions of photographs from the epicenter of the conflict that have never before been published.

This series is organized by Emily Fjaellen Thompson, Ph.D. Candidate, Sociocultural Anthropology, UC Berkeley.

Sep 28 | Conversatorio I: Carlos Valer Delgado y Jaime Urrutia Ceruti

Oct 17 | Conversatorio II 

*Click here for more information on the CLACS Co-Sponsored Event Series Grants