Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
CLACS

Presence-Work: Temporal Violence and Activist Rhythms on the Sonoran Migrant Trails

October 5 event poster

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

4:00pm – 5:30pm

Register here to join the webinar.   

Join us for a talk by Mellon Sawyer Seminar Post-Doctoral Fellow Kristen Kolenz, who will be affiliated with CLACS for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Kristen A. Kolenz earned her MA and PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University and her BA in philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research focuses on resistance to state violence, Central American social movements, migration, and the transformative potential of everyday practices through the lens of decolonial and transnational feminisms. She is currently working on her book manuscript, an analysis of the transnational movements and community-building practices of Central Americans subjected to forced migration, dangerous crossing conditions, and confinement. In the study, Dr. Kolenz takes an interdisciplinary methodological approach that combines ethnographic methods, her own activist practice, and dance studies. The project bridges the fields of Latin American and Latinx Studies, bringing together research conducted in Guatemala, the Sonoran Desert, and immigrant justice movements in the US. The project’s goal is to document the transformative possibilities that emerge from Central Americans’ everyday practices of coping with loss, distance, and violence and to theorize transnational belonging in resistance to white supremacy.

Sawyer Seminar Series