Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
CLACS

CLACS Reading Group | Embodied Knowledges: Environmental Humanities in Latin America

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

12:30pm – 2:00pm

South Common Room (256) at the Watson Institute.

About the Group

This reading group stems from the necessity to discuss urgent political questions about the environment in an informal setting through Latin American literary formulations of ecological themes in the 20th and 21st centuries. Privileging indigenous and Latin American perspectives, this group will read novels, academic texts, and testimonies to delve deeper into the challenges that the environmental crisis is posing to modern ontologies and epistemologies.

Our first reading will be Pluriverse Politics: the Real and the Possible, by Arturo Escobar. Arturo Escobar is a Colombian-American anthropologist, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Pluriversal Politics was written in Spanish in 2017 and translated to English in 2020. In the book, Escobar reflects on social movements against large-scale extractivist projects in Latin America, and their fight for a pluriversal world. If you would like a copy, please let us know here (first come first served). The book is also available online through BruKnow here.

Wednesday January 29, 2025: Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, Kency Cornejo
Wednesday February 26, 2025: The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert
Wednesday April 2, 2025: Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías
Wednesday April 30, 2025: Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez