Course Details

Course offered Spring 2015

Honors 394 B: Moments of Danger: Memory, Hope, Activism in Latin America (A&H / SSc, DIV)

Honors 394 B: Moments of Danger: Memory, Hope, Activism in Latin America (A&H / SSc, DIV)

SLN 14862 (View UW registration info »)

Maria Elena Garcia (Comparative History of Ideas; Anthropology; American Indian Studies; Geography; Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies)
Office: B102 Padelford Hall, Box 354300
Phone: 206 221-0561
Email: meg71@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 13 students

Honors Credit Type

This Honors/CHID seminar invites students to think critically about violence, memory and social movements in Latin America. Ideally, the course would be linked to the CHID/Honors study abroad program to Peru (Summer 2015) where students will engage with narratives about political violence and with intellectuals, artists and activists working toward social change. Theoretically, students will examine how notions of “otherness” and the power to label are central to the cultural politics of violence. After examining the forces and discourses of state authoritarianism, the gendered strategies of torture, and the role of race and ethnicity in political violence, students will learn about the politics of struggle, resilience and hope. Specifically, students will learn about Indigenous movements for food sovereignty and against extractive industry; they will consider the role of art in social activism, and they will read and hear from human rights activists and other social justice actors. In addition to ethnography and social scientific analysis, we will rely on films, documentaries, historical fiction, plays, and testimonials to interrogate the complexities of violence and social movements in Latin America. Given the connection to the Peru summer program, the class will use Peru as an anchor for thinking about questions of violence and struggle, but the class will also consider examples beyond this Andean country such as language and terror in Argentina, racial conflict in Guatemala, the violence of extractive industry in Ecuador, and the politics of memory in Chile.