CLLAS grantees
Spring Graduate Research Colloquium II: Resilience in Transnational Communities
| April 28, 2022 | ||
| 3:30 pm | to | 5:00 pm |
CLLAS Research Series
125 McKenzie
Alejandra Pedraza (Global Studies)
“The expansion of caregiving during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from a migrant-sending community in rural Mexico”
Alejandra Pedraza is a second-year graduate student in the Global Studies department. She received her B.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder in Environmental Studies and Biology. During her undergraduate career, Alejandra immersed herself in various conservation and sustainability projects in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. This is where her passion for international development and Latin American affairs first developed. Upon graduating, Alejandra joined Peace Corps Mexico, where she worked until the COVID-19 pandemic forced her evacuation.
For two years, Alejandra called a remote Mexican village in the Sierra Madre Occidental home. Through integration in an isolated village entirely dependent on remittances and living alongside the people directly impacted by the dynamics of transnational family life, particularly the women and children that remain behind, Alejandra discovered her passion for understanding Mexican American migration, transnational families, and the gendered costs of migration.
Alejandra is currently working on a qualitative research study seeking to elucidate the ways the COVID-19 pandemic is expanding gendered caregiving responsibilities in remittance-dependent households in rural Mexico. In her research, Alejandra forefronts the social conditions of migration that have been exacerbated during the pandemic and the deep wellbeing implications these changes have for the mothers in her sample.
David Peña (School of Art and Design)
“Ecotone”
David Peña is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and cultural organizer from the border region between Tijuana and San Diego. I use the visual vocabulary of patterns as a way to contemplate personal and public occurrences and as a point of collaboration. I seek to connect my visual practice with my commitment to people and place, exploring ways to bridge community. I use my work as a vehicle for collaboration with artists engaged in diverse media, students and the general public. These collaborations have been realized as interventions with text, photography, murals, and self-publishing.
Spring Graduate Research Colloquium I: Tension, Gender, Poetry, and Song in Latin American Literature
| April 14, 2022 | ||
| 3:30 pm | to | 5:00 pm |
CLLAS Research Series
125 McKenzie
Marina Penalosa (Romance Languages)
“An Intellectual Field in Tension. The Other Borges”
Marina Penalosa is a PhD candidate in the Department of Romance Languages. Her dissertation “An Intellectual Field in Tension. The Other Borges” explores how Jorge Luis Borges’ lectures shaped him as a canonical Argentine writer, through the global evolution of his role in the intellectual field. The project seeks to address Borges’ efforts to occupy a privileged position in the public sphere in the microcosm of the cultural field. I analyze the context of the cultural events from the 1920s to the late 1980s in Argentina through the lenses of literary analysis and cultural sociology. Her presentation is the result of the archival work she did in Buenos Aires. With the support of the CLLAS scholarship she worked on the archives of the National Library to find traces of the cultural events of the public lectures in the city during the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Elizabeth Sotelo (Romance Languages)
“Beyond Gender: Inequalities and Invisibilities Among Female Literary Chroniclers in Peru and Mexico”
Elizabeth Sotelo is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. She obtained an M.A. degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of California Riverside and a B.A. in Spanish literature and linguistics from California State Polytechnic University Pomona. Her research interests are Latin American literature and culture from the 20th and 21st centuries (emphasis on Peru and Mexico), the chronicle genre, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, critical theory, feminist studies, and narratology. Currently, she is working on her dissertation “The Urban Literary Chronicle in Peru and Mexico (1999-2021): Inhabitants, Peripheries, Epistemic Decolonization”, which focuses on how selected chronicles render visible a decolonizing and political stand through their writing.
Magela Baudoin (Romance Languages)
“Poetry and Popular Song in Matilde Casazola and Violeta Parra: The Journey of the Seed”
Magela Baudoin is a Bolivian writer and journalist, author of the books “Mujeres de Costado” (Plural 2010), “El sonido de la H” (National Novel Award 2014-Bolivia), “La composición de la sal” (Gabriel García Márquez Hispano-American Short Story Prize-2015), and “Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos” (finalist for the VI Ribera del Duero-Páginas de Espuma Award in Spain-2020). Her work has been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese and Arabic. Together with Giovanna Rivero, she directs Editorial Mantis, specialized in publishing the work of Spanish-speaking women. In 2021 she received the Anna Seghers award. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Literature and Romance Languages at the University from Oregon (USA).
Researching Experiences of Uncertainty and Collective Care
| May 12, 2021 | ||
| 12:00 pm | to | 1:00 pm |
Event
Please join us for the Spring 2021 CLLAS Research Series Graduate Student Colloquium!
This is a remote event and will take place over Zoom. To join the CLLAS email list and receive Zoom login information, please email us at cllas@uoregon.edu or subscribe here.
Polet Campos-Melchor (Anthropology), “El Noa Noa: Strategies of Love and Care at the U.S.- México border”
In this talk, I textualize my ethnographic research conducted in Ciudad Juárez during the summer of 2019 and the 10 follow up virtual interviews I conducted in 2020. The questions that informed my research are: How do trans asylum seekers re-conceptualize love as a survival strategy in the context of migration? What strategies do trans asylum seekers utilize while navigating the U.S.-México border? How do trans asylum seekers narrate their experiences of love in the face of trans bigotry and at the intersections of trans phobia, homophobia and xenophobia? By focusing on trans asylum seekers’ experiences, I propose that trans asylum seekers’ strategies of love at the U.S.- México border challenge existing heteronormative migration narratives and stories of LGBT+ subjectivities.
Lola Loustaunau (Sociology), “From disposability to collective care: experiences of migrant essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic”
For migrant workers in food processing “becoming essential” during the past year meant the exacerbation of their disposability. This research explores these workers’ experiences as the pandemic unfolded, how they struggled for their and their families’ survival, and as they did so, built new and expansive communities of care. I argue that unpacking the affective dimension of their working conditions and their collective organizing allows seeing how these workers turned coraje into courage and defied the structural oppression that had rendered them disposable.
Polet Campos-Melchor and Lola Loustaunau were both awarded the 2020 CLLAS Summer Research Grant.
Polet Campos-Melchor is a PhD student in Anthropology and Graduate Certificate student in WGSS at the University of Oregon. Her research explores how trans and lesbian migrants and scholars articulate and narrate strategies of love and care, expanding beyond only the imaginary into tangible strategies of survival. Polet is also a University of Oregon Promising Scholar. Her research has been funded by the Tinker Foundation, the University of Oregon’s Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society.
Lola Loustaunau is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department. Her research focuses on precarity, low-wage migrant workers, emotions, and collective organizing. She has received several awards for her dissertation work and will be a Wayne Morse Graduate Fellow for the AY 2021-2022. She has recently co-authored: ‘No choice but to be essential: expanding dimensions of precarity during the COVID-19’ (Sociological perspectives, 2021) and ‘Impossible choices: how workers manage unpredictable scheduling practices’ (Labor Studies Journal 2019).
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