Tulane University

China's Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America: New Wine in Old Bottles?

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The Center for Inter-American Policy and Research will be hosting Dr. Matt Ferchen for a talk titled China’s belt and Road Initiative in Latin America: New Wine in Old Bottles? on January 23, 2019 at noon.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted global attention since it was first introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013. Despite the hype and anxiety surrounding the BRI’s apparent extension to the region, it remains unclear whether its rollout there will change entrenched patters, challenges, and dysfunctions in the China-LAC (Latin American and Caribbean) relationship or merely deepen them. Moreover, at a time of growing US-China strategic rivalry, the expansion of BRI-themed deal-making in LAC is already playing into growing major-power competition and tension.

Matt Ferchen is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy where he runs the China and the Developing World Program. From 2008-2017 Ferchen was the first and only full-time foreign member of the International Relations Department at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Dr. Ferchen has a Masters in Latin America and China Studies from John Hopkins SAIS (1997) and a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics and International Relations from Cornell (2008).

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to cipr@tulane.edu.

Sociology Colloquium Series to host talk by Javier Auyero on collusion and violence in Argentina

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Join the Sociology Department at Tulane University in welcoming Dr. Javier Auyero, for a talk titled The Ambivalent State: Collusion and Violence in Latin America on Thursday, January 24, at 3:30 PM.

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a poor high-crime neighborhood of Argentina and documentary evidence from court cases involving drug traffickers and police officers, this talk examines the clandestine connections between participants in the illicit drug trade and members of the state security forces – and their impact on skyrocketing urban violence. The presentation unpacks the much-referred to (but seldom scrutinized) content of police-criminal collusion reconstructing the resources, relational practices, and processes at its core. The talk makes its three-fold argument by way of empirical demonstration: a) illicit relationships between police agents and traffickers serve the latter to achieve a quasi-monopoly in the use of force over a territory that is central to the prosecution of their illegal trade, b) clandestine relationships between police officers and traffickers feed the systemic violence that characterizes the market of illegal drugs and contributes to localized violence, and c) police-trafficker collusion fosters widespread skepticism about law-enforcement among residents of low-income violent neighborhoods.

Dr. Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of Poor People’s Politics, Contentious Lives, Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and Patients of the State. Together with Débora Swistun, he co-authored Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. His new book, In Harm’s Way: The dynamics of urban violence, co-authored with María Fernanda Berti, was recently published by Princeton University Press. He is also the editor of Invisible City: Life and Labor in Austin, Texas (published this year by University of Texas Press), and co-editor – with Philippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes – of Violence at the Urban Margins (published this year by Oxford University Press).

Stone Center for Latin American Studies to host 11th annual Workshop on Field Research Methods

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Join us at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies for the 11th Annual Weekend Workshop on Field Research Methods on Saturday, January 26, 2019. The deadline to apply for the workshop is January 15, 2019.

How will you get the data you need for your thesis or dissertation? Do you envision immersing yourself for months in the local culture, or tromping the hills and farms seeking respondents? Sorting through dusty archives? Observing musicians at work in the plaza? Downloading and crunching numbers on a computer? For any of these approaches: How might you get there, from here?

This workshop aims to help you approach your data collection and analysis for your thesis or dissertation topic, and to adapt and refine your topic to be more feasible. You will take your research project ideas to the next stop—whatever that may be, include raising travel grants. Learn to:

• Plan more efficiently, feasible, and rewarding fieldwork
• Prepare more compelling and persuasive grant proposals
• Navigate choices of research methods and course offerings on campus
• Become a better research and fieldwork team-member

Format
This is an engaged, hands-on, informal workshop. Everyone shares ideas and participates. We will explore and compare research approaches, share experiences and brainstorm alternatives. You will be encouraged to think differently about your topic, questions, and study sites as well as language preparation, budgets, and logistics. The participatory format is intended to spark constructive new thinking, strategies, and student networks to continue learning about (and conducting) field research.

Who is leading this?
Laura Murphy, PhD, faculty in Global Community Health and Behavioral Sciences, and affiliate faculty to the Stone Center for Latin American Studies.

Who is this for?
This workshop is targeted to Stone Center graduate students as well as graduate students from other programs (GOHB, CCC, humanities, sciences, and others) if space is available. The workshop will be particularly helpful for those who envision research with human subjects.

Sign up
Sign up as soon as you can! Apply by January 15, 2019, at the latest to confirm your stop. Send an email with the following details:

• Your name
• Department and Degree program
• Year at Tulane
• Prior experience in research, especially field research
• Academic training in research design and methods
• Include a 1-paragraph statement of your current research interests and immediate plans/needs (i.e. organize summer field research)

Light breakfast and lunch will be provided. Not for credit.

For more information and/or to apply: Contact Laura Murphy or Jimmy Huck.

K-12 Professional Development Opportunity: Resources and Pedagogy on Latin American Studies

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On Saturday, January 26, 2019, join us at the Louisiana Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) Annual Meeting for a professional development opportunity. This year’s meeting will include a presentation on pedagogy by Lolla Blas Troncoso, a middle school Spanish Instructor at the Isidore Newman School and a session on the Latin American Resources available at Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies by Denise Woltering-Vargas, Senior Program Manager at Tulane University’s Stone Center Latin American Studies.

This conference is free and open to all educators and membership in the AATSP is not required. Please RSVP as space is limited. Please RSVP to Stephanie Davis.

The event will be held in the Reynolds Room at the Isidore Newman School. Please use the Loyola Street Lower School entrance, located at 5320 Loyola, the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Loyola Street.

K-12 Educator Workshop at the Audubon Zoo: Rescuing the Rainforest

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Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies in collaboration with the Audubon Nature Institute will be hosting a K-12 educator workshop Rescuing the Rainforest at the Audubon Zoo on Saturday, February 2, 2019. Rescuing the Rainforest will focus on conservation efforts and environment of Central American rainforests. This workshop is a great way to learn how to bring real world science into your classroom. Activities will incorporate a variety of sciences and other subjects including: art, environmental science, cultural components, anthropology, computer science and technology. While it is geared for middle and high school teachers, this workshop is open to all educators formal and informal. We are delighted to have Dr. Katharine Jack, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Environmental Studies at Tulane University, join us for this workshop.

Please register here. The cost is $45.00 per participant. Lunch will be provided.

Please contact educationprograms@auduboninstitute.org for additional information.

Latin American Library to host Brazilian photographer João Farkas for talk and exhibit Amazônia Ocupada

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The Latin American Library in collaboration with the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and the Departments of History and Spanish & Portuguese at Tulane University will be hosting an exhibit opening and talk titled Amazônia Ocupada, featuring Brazilian photographer João Farkas on Friday, February 8, 2019. The evening will begin with a conversation between João Farkas and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Christopher Dunn. A reception will follow.

Amazônia Ocupada features the work of Brazilian photographer João Farkas, who documented the mass migration of workers from throughout Brazil who came to the Amazon basin in the 1980s and 1990s to try their luck in gold mining, logging and cattle ranching, often with devastating effects on the environment and the indigenous peoples of the region. The exhibit also includes rare books, maps, and other material from the special collections of The Latin American Library tracing Western conceptualizations of the Amazon region beginning with the earliest post-contact explorations in the 16th century to 20th century narratives about the region.

João Farkas is one of Brazil’s leading documentary and environmental photographers with projects that document life in the coastal village of Trancoso, Bahia, the carnival masks of Maragojipe, Bahia, and the world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal, as well as the occupation of the Amazon.

A related symposium featuring historians and anthropologists of the Amazon region will be held on Saturday February 9, 2019, in Jones Hall 100A, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. More information forthcoming.

These events are sponsored by The Latin American Library, the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, and the Departments of History and Spanish & Portuguese at Tulane University.

Photo credit: João Farkas Amazonia