SURCLA SEMINAR SERIES
Every second Tuesday, starting week 4, from 5 - 7
Venue: Quadrangle Building, The Refectory H113
SEMESTER 1, 2012
- Tue 27 March: Ana Kondic
- Tue 17 April: Alana Mann
- Tue 15 May: Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrandez
- Tue 29 May: Brett Todd
Tue 27 March: Ana Kondic
A year with Huastec: Language documentation program in Mexico
The presenter will share her experience of living and working with the Maya of the state of Veracruz, Mexico, reflecting on the community-linguist interaction issues that consume a large proportion of a field worker energy and time. The focus of the presentation will be on the last speakers of South Eastern Huastec, their world-view, their beliefs and their lifestyle that are quickly changing.
The project of documentation of the South Eastern Huastec language and the community members who supported it will be discussed. This project aimed to document the usage of the language in all its varieties and to create a digital data base. It was financed by a SOAS HRELP grant (Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program, the School of African and Asian Studies of the University of London, UK) and a Mexican Government scholarship.
South Eastern Huastec (Ethnologue code HSF) is one of the least known Mayan languages. It is highly endangered as it is not passed to the new generations anymore; there is hardly anyone under 30 years of age who can speak it. This language is spoken by about 1700 people in the region of La Huasteca, northern Veracruz, Mexico. The author has undertaken extensive field work in the village of San Francisco, Chontla, documenting their fascinating language and culture.
Biography: Ana Kondic is finishing her PhD studies in linguistics in cotutelle between the University of Sydney and the University Lyon 2, France. She has carried out documentation of an endangered Maya language in Mexico and now is writing a grammar of that language. Ana has been teaching Spanish at the University of Sydney for about 10 years.
Tue 17 April: Alana Mann
No Corn, No Country: Mexican campesinos organising against NAFTA]]
Mexican agriculture is in a state of crisis. The economic marginalization of small to medium-sized grain farmers is leading to migration, hyper-urbanization and environmentally unsustainable cultivation methods. Many civil society organizations identify free trade agreements (FTAs) as the root of these problems. This seminar presents a case study of one such organisation, Asociación Nacional de Empresas Comercializadoras de Productores del Campo (ANEC), a co-operative of Mexican grain-growers. ANEC is an active member of La V'a Campesina (‘The Peasant Way’), a transnational social movement of 150 smallholder farmers and landless peasant organizations in 60 countries. This ‘movement of movements’ opposes neo-liberal policies that perpetuate inequalities and wealth disparities between small-scale producers and the transnational corporations (TNCs) that dominate the global food system. La V'a Campesina promotes an alternative to the industrial, market-led model of agriculture in the form of an agrarian reform-based ‘food sovereignty’. This seminar interrogates how ANEC draws on the master frame of food sovereignty in developing collective action frames that drive local campaigns opposing economic and environmental threats to the health and livelihoods of rural and urban Mexicans.
Biography: Dr Alana Mann joined the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney in July 2007. The paper on which her presentation is based was published in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (JILAR) in December, 2011. Her doctoral thesis, Framing Food Sovereignty: A Study of Social Movement Communication, analyses the campaigning activities of rural social movement organisations (SMOs) in Chile, Mexico and Spain. Last year Alana worked with the Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN) in Heidelberg, Germany, where she edited the Right to Food Quarterly and contributed to the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2011, an international publication monitoring the accountability of state and non-state actors in fulfilling the right to adequate food.
Tue 15 May: Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrandez
Racial and ethnic categorisation in Latin American censuses (19th, 20th and 21st centuries): perspectives for comparative analysis
Ethnic and racial categories have re-emerged as pivotal in Latin American politics. States in the region are adjusting to the growing influence of social movements, political parties and civil organisations that, with differing strategies and outcomes, appeal to those social categories as a source of identification, mobilisation and/or political capital. In parallel, some governments are drawing on narratives of ethnicity and even raciality in order to reshape national identities and create new legitimacies for post-neoliberal political models. In this presentation, I will approach the study of these complex social processes through the analyses of national censuses, which can be considered both a reflection of grassroots political struggles and a state instrument of population management. Concretely, through comparative analysis and a diachronic perspective, I will discuss some of the political factors that have influenced the development of racial and ethnic categorisations in Latin American censuses from the 19th century up to the present day. The comparative scope will include the following countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
Biography: Luis Fernando is a Spanish political anthropologist who has lived and worked in Latin America for seven years before coming to the University of Sydney. His recent research examines the concepts of ethnicity, citizenship and indigenous political organisation and comparatively investigates the relations between states and indigenous peoples in the continent. He uses that research as the grounding for thought and discussion that, in applied terms, envisages ways of strengthening civic forms of cohabitation and democratic organisation in the contemporary polis. He is currently co-editing a volume on racial and ethnic categories in Latin America.
Tue 29 May: Brett Todd
Born on the 31st of December
This session will feature the screening of the 2011 documentary Nacimos el 31 de Diciembre (We were born on the 31st of December) by the Colombian filmmaker, Priscilla Padilla. It tells the story of one of the many acts of discrimination inflicted by the Colombian state on the country’s indigenous populations: the practice by civil registry staff to record offensive names and comments – along with the uniform birth date alluded to by the film’s title – on the identification documents of members of the Wayuu people, taking cruel advantage of their limited literacy or lack of Spanish language. Despite constitutional recognition of indigenous Colombian peoples, their cultures and their languages, it was only media attention generated by the film that pushed the registry into addressing this mass racist insult. The documentary will be presented by Brett Todd, whose PhD research examines recent moves to protect Colombia’s native languages and the cultural rights of their speakers.
Biography: A graduate in law, government and economics from the University of Sydney, Brett Todd was a solicitor with a Sydney CBD employment law firm for five years, but has spent more time doing other things in other places, living in Japan, Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Chile, Argentina and Colombia; this included internships with UNHCR and the Argentine human rights group CELS and a visiting researcher period at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá. Following postgraduate studies in applied linguistics and international studies, Brett has been a casual academic at the University of Technology Sydney since 2007 as well as an accredited Spanish-to-English translator. He is now in the final year of a PhD in Politics and International Relations with the University of New South Wales, drawing on his diverse disciplinary backgrounds to research recent policies aimed at protecting indigenous and other minority languages in Colombia
Past Events
2011
22 March | Justo Díaz Music Director, Papalote
Music and Politics in the 1980s: Papalote and La Peña's experience
5 April | Eric Courthès Professor of Spanish, Tahiti
Amado Bonpland: Generador de re-escrituras transgenéricas
19 April | Gabina Funegra University of New South Wales
Quechua: the Fading Inca Language
3 May | Fernando Serrano University of Sydney
Challenging or Reshaping Heteronormativity with Public Policies? A Case Study from Bogotá, Colombia
17 May | Annick Pellegrin University of Sydney
Do You Think US Comics are the Only Ones With Strong Men?”: Traitors and National Heroes in Rius’s Los Supermachos and the (de)Configuration of the Mexican Nation
31 May | Claudia Alarcón University of Sydney
Television, Gender and the Representation of Tragedy: the 2010 Earthquake in Chile
6 September | Mariana Rodr'guez University of Technology, Sydney
Teresa Mendoza: a Critical Reading of the Many Personifications of La reina del sur
14 September | Annick Pellegrin University of Sydney
“Ce n’est ni le lieu ni le moment! Eloignons-nous au plus vite!”:
Time Travel, Ecology and the Place of Latin America in L’horloger de la comète.
20 September | Adrian Hearn University of Sydney
Latin America and the ‘China Threat’: Fact or Fiction?
11 October: Mar'a Fernanda Cardoso Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney
Genitalic Extravagance
25 October: Emma Cannen University of Technology, Sydney
Presidential Masculinity in Images: A Patriot, a Contemporary & a Venezuelan Caudillo?
2010
3 August | Juan Salazar, University of Western Sydney
Performing self-determination: the critical making of indigenous media in Latin America
17 August | Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra University of Texas at Austin
The Bible in Spanish America: Memory and Clerical Global Identities
We would like to thank the Sydney Sawyer “The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field” Conference organisers (funded by the Mellon Foundation) and the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry for supporting] Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s visit.
31 August | Erin Taylor, University of Sydney
¡Crisis is Coming! Visions of Material and Immaterial Ends
14 September | Luiz Pericás, FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales)
Brazilian Contemporary Politics and the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - MST)
We would like to thank ANCLAS (the Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies) at ANU for supporting Luiz Pericás’s visit.
5 October | Liliana Correa, University of Western Sydney
Artistic Practice as Methodology for Cultural Research
19 October | Juan Valencia, Macquarie University
Hips don’t lie: Nationalism, Globalization and Music Videos in 21st century Colombia