Spring 2020 Colloquium Series: Alex E. Chávez

2-21-20 Chavez

Chávez Verses and Flows: Migrant Lives and the Sounds of Crossing

Alex E. Chávez
Nancy O’Neill Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

ABSTRACT
In his award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke 2017), Dr. Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and aural poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. In this presentation, he draws on this work to address how Mexican migrants voice desires of recognition and connection through performance, and the politics such desires attain amidst the transnational context of migrant deportability. As a researcher, artist, and participant, Chávez has consistently crossed the boundary between scholar and performer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work as a musician and producer. In this presentation, he draws on these experiences to address the politics of his intellectual and creative work and how he engages both to theorize around the political efficacy of sound-based practices, the “voice,” and the disciplinary futures of borderlands anthropology.

Friday, February 21, 2020
4:15-6:15 PM | room C415A
The Graduate Center | 365 Fifth Ave.

gc.cuny.edu/anthropology

Spring 2020 Colloquium Series: Feb. 7 Nina Glick Schiller

2-7-20 Schiller

Dispossession: A Conjunctural Analysis

Nina Glick Schiller, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Abstract: Analyses of emerging processes of capital accumulation through dispossession can illuminate both ethnographic research and struggles to build inclusive movements for social justice at a global conjunctural moment of racist authoritarianism and the rise of a neo-fascist “right’.  After examining the current moment and debates about the nature and contemporary significance of accumulation by dispossession, I link these debates to the anthropology of migration, cities, and social movements.

Welcoming new faculty member Professor Christopher Loperena to the Anthropology Department!

Picture of Christopher LoperenaPh.D., University of Texas at Austin

Loperena’s research examines indigenous and black struggles for territorial autonomy in Central America, ethicality and subject formation, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. In addition to his current book project, A Fragmented Paradise: Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Progress in Post-Coup Honduras, he is co-editing a themed issue on the role of cultural evidence in the adjudication of indigenous rights. He joins The Graduate Center from the University of San Francisco, where he was an assistant professor of International Studies.

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Core-Bios/Christopher-Loperena