Events

    Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    The yearlong Sawyer Seminar seeks to understand contemporary contestation over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. It will explore the struggles and experiences of citizenship of this vastly heterogeneous group, which have been starkly uneven across time and across (and within) countries. The Seminar will also ask what these differences can teach us, including how these Afro-Latin American perspectives can help inform our...

    Read more about Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- The Long Road to (In)Justice and Reparations

    3:00pm to 4:45pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South- Tsai Auditorium

    The journey towards justice and reparations in the wake of the tailings dam failures in Brumadinho and Mariana has been arduous and protracted, marked by legal battles, environmental concerns, and demands for accountability. The legal process has been complex and international, with lawsuits filed against the companies for negligence, environmental violations, and human rights abuses in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Efforts to secure reparations for victims, including compensation for loss of life, livelihoods, and environmental remediation, have been met with challenges,...

    Read more about Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- The Long Road to (In)Justice and Reparations

    Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Contested Spaces: Controlling Narratives and Territories

    1:30pm to 2:45pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South- Tsai Auditorium

    Since the Fundão and Córrego do Feijão dams collapsed in 2015 and 2019, respectively, local communities and the mining companies responsible for the catastrophes have battled over the causes of the failures as well as the control of impacted territories. Brazilian journalism professor André Luís Carvalho will share his experiences working with citizen journalists in affected communities to co-create and maintain media platforms to preserve memory and denounce violations. 

    Learn more about the panel series on "...

    Read more about Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Contested Spaces: Controlling Narratives and Territories

    Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Measuring the Unmeasurable: Health-Related Quality of Life Losses

    11:15am to 12:30pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South- Tsai Auditorium

    In 2015, the Samarco-operated Fundão dam collapsed in the municipality of Mariana, Brazil, unleashing a tsunami of nearly two billion cubic feet of mineral waste onto downstream communities. Over the course of 20 days, the waste traveled over 370 miles downriver, contaminating waterways and destroying almost 1,600 acres of vegetation. Nineteen people died and more than 600 families lost their homes. Brazilian economist Mônica Viegas will share the results of her 2021 study to estimate health-related quality of life (HRQoL) losses among affected communities. 

    Learn...

    Read more about Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Measuring the Unmeasurable: Health-Related Quality of Life Losses

    Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Trauma, (In)Justice, and Action: A Conversation with Community Leaders

    9:30am to 11:00am

    Location: 

    CGIS South- Tsai Auditorium

    Data, infographics, and technical reports cannot communicate the trauma suffered by communities impacted by tailings dam collapses. Though the failures of the Samarco-operated Fundão dam in 2015 and Vale´s Córrego do Feijão dam in 2019 are years in the past, local communities in Brazil are still reeling. Many continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress, the loss of loved ones, contaminated drinking water, and the impunity of those responsible for the dam failures. Join us to learn what justice, reconciliation, and reparations looks like for impacted communities.  

    ... Read more about Predatory Extractivism Panel Series- Trauma, (In)Justice, and Action: A Conversation with Community Leaders

    Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    The yearlong Sawyer Seminar seeks to understand contemporary contestation over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. It will explore the struggles and experiences of citizenship of this vastly heterogeneous group, which have been starkly uneven across time and across (and within) countries. The Seminar will also ask what these differences can teach us, including how these Afro-Latin American perspectives can help inform our...

    Read more about Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    The Role of Courts in Advancing the Right to a Healthy Environment: Lessons from Latin America

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    Austin Hall; 111 Classroom – West. Harvard Law School

    Latin America has been at the forefront of judicialization of a right to a healthy environment. Courts in different countries have curbed burning and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as the expansion of wind farms in Mexico; they have ordered the clean-up of river basins in Argentina and ordered the protection of important ecosystems in Colombia. Some high courts have embraced ‘rights of nature’ and have fashioned innovative structural remedies, which have included the creation of new institutions. Nonetheless, there is a very mixed record on implementation of the judgments...

    Read more about The Role of Courts in Advancing the Right to a Healthy Environment: Lessons from Latin America

    Roots of Resilience: Art and Heritage as Drivers of Socio-economic Development in the Iron Quadrangle - Brazil

    12:00pm to 1:15pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South S216

    Minas Gerais’ Quadrilátero Ferrífero, or Iron Quadrangle, is one of Brazil’s richest cultural, environmental and historical regions, home to two UNESCO World Heritage towns and Brazil’s largest iron ore reserves. The Quadrilátero Ferrífero region offers centuries of history through its architecture, monuments, archaeological sites, culinary, rituals, handicrafts, religious festivals and natural resources. Yet its local communities, natural environment and rich cultural heritage are at imminent risk from catastrophic natural and humanitarian disasters resulting from industrial mining. The...

    Read more about Roots of Resilience: Art and Heritage as Drivers of Socio-economic Development in the Iron Quadrangle - Brazil

    Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    S216, CGIS South

    The yearlong Sawyer Seminar seeks to understand contemporary contestation over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. It will explore the struggles and experiences of citizenship of this vastly heterogeneous group, which have been starkly uneven across time and across (and within) countries.

    The Seminar will also ask what these differences can teach us, including how these Afro-Latin American perspectives can help inform...

    Read more about Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    The Impact of Violence on Community Health Workers/Agents in Brazil: Policy Implications

    1:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    677 Huntington Avenue, Building 1, Room 1208

    This seminar is part of the Thursday Brown Bag Series, at the Department of Global Health and Population at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The series features current research of members and affiliates of GHP. The intent is to educate and raise the awareness of our community and beyond, about the research activities presently being conducted by faculty, students, researchers, and special guests of the department.

    Brown Bag Seminars will...

    Read more about The Impact of Violence on Community Health Workers/Agents in Brazil: Policy Implications

    The Greener Gender: Women Politicians and Deforestation in Brazil

    12:00pm to 1:15pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South S216, Hybrid

    This event is hybrid, to attend remotely register here.

    This paper examines the impact of women’s political representation on deforestation rates in Brazil. Using close election regression discontinuity design, we show that women, when elected to office, are more likely to drive improved environmental outcomes due to factors such as reduced access to corrupt networks that influence the enforcement of environmental laws at the local level. Altogether, our findings demonstrate...

    Read more about The Greener Gender: Women Politicians and Deforestation in Brazil

    Indigenous Architecture in Brazil as Heritage

    12:00pm to 1:15pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South S216

    The constructed space plays a crucial role in the memory and sustenance of Indigenous communities in Brazil. Despite this significance, the preservation efforts of Indigenous architecture by the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional - IPHAN) have yet to fully incorporate this element. This seminar investigates how the Institute approached Indigenous heritage since 1937, navigating intellectual confrontations across diverse Brazilian cultural institutions and addressing the limited discourse surrounding Indigenous...

    Read more about Indigenous Architecture in Brazil as Heritage

    Repression Archives? Working with Documents from Police Institutions in Latin America

    12:00pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South - S040 Uziel Family Seminar Room

    This workshop, open to scholars of any disciplinary background and geographic area, will focus on the challenges of historical work (broadly defined) in police archives. Based on research experiences with documentary collections of different police forces in South America and Southern Europe, it will attempt to discuss the connections between methodological strategies and historiographical problems. Police archives have been used extensively in the history of crime, marginality, state surveillance practices, political policing, and the repression of the labor movement...

    Read more about Repression Archives? Working with Documents from Police Institutions in Latin America

    Money on the margins: Counterfeiters, Migrants, and Policemen in the Ibero-American World, 1880-1940.

    4:30pm

    Location: 

    CGIS South S250

    At the turn of the twentieth century, several financial crises resulted in extreme illiquidity and retraction of bank credit. Such a situation created opportunities for the activities of counterfeiters and the formation of criminal networks that circulated across the Atlantic as part of larger circuits of migration connecting Europe with the Americas. National agencies sought to limit the action of local authorities – who were often suspected of negligence and even complicity with counterfeiters – and built collaborations with police from other countries.

    This presentation...

    Read more about Money on the margins: Counterfeiters, Migrants, and Policemen in the Ibero-American World, 1880-1940.

    Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    S216, CGIS South

    The yearlong Sawyer Seminar seeks to understand contemporary contestation over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. It will explore the struggles and experiences of citizenship of this vastly heterogeneous group, which have been starkly uneven across time and across (and within) countries.

    The Seminar will also ask what these differences can teach us, including how these Afro-Latin American perspectives can help inform...

    Read more about Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    Desinformación en América Latina: Retos para la democracia liberal

    4:30pm to 6:30pm

    Location: 

    Observatory of the Spanish Language and Hispanic Cultures in the United States (2 Arrow Street, 4th Floor), Hybrid

    Speaker: Juan Luis Manfredi, Príncipe de Asturías Distinguished Visiting Professor, Georgetown University.

    Moderated by Javier Lafuente Preciados, Harvard Nieman Fellow.

    Welcoming remarks by Alisha Holland, Professor of Government at Harvard University.

    This event is hybrid, to attend register here.

    For more information, click...

    Read more about Desinformación en América Latina: Retos para la democracia liberal

    Harvard Film Archive Screening: It is night in America (É Noite na América)

    7:00pm to 8:05pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street

    In the opening shot of Ana Vaz’s feature debut, an intense blue descends upon the sprawling, modernist metropolis of Brasília, which starts spinning out of control as a symphony of wild animal sounds crescendos. It is night in America. A recognition, an alarm, an investigation, a lament…Vaz’s film sounds every one of these notes and then some, within rather subtle boundaries, such as the limited exposure and contrast range of an expired 16mm film stock, along with “day for night” shooting techniques that fabricate a permanent twilight. Through patient and attentive observation, Vaz...

    Read more about Harvard Film Archive Screening: It is night in America (É Noite na América)

    Harvard Film Archive Screening: Ana Vaz Short Films

    7:00pm to 8:15pm

    Location: 

    Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street

    The screenings are part of the Harvard Film Archive Film Series EXCAVATING SUBTERRANEA. THE FILM POEMS OF ANA VAZ

    Apiyemiyekî? Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France/Portugal/Netherlands, 2019, DCP, color and b&w, 27 min. DCP source: Lightcone

    Amazing Fantasy. Directed by Ana Vaz. France/Japan, 2018, DCP, color, 3 min. DCP source: Lightcone

    There Is Land! (Há terra!). Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/France, 2016, DCP, color, 13 min. Portuguese with English subtitles. DCP source: Lightcone

    Atomic Garden. Directed by Ana Vaz. Brazil/Portugal, 2018,...

    Read more about Harvard Film Archive Screening: Ana Vaz Short Films

    Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    S216, CGIS South

    The yearlong Sawyer Seminar seeks to understand contemporary contestation over citizenship and belonging by Afrodescendants in Latin America, situating these struggles within long-term, historical patterns of nation building, racial stratification, and political mobilization. It will explore the struggles and experiences of citizenship of this vastly heterogeneous group, which have been starkly uneven across time and across (and within) countries.

    The Seminar will also ask what these differences can teach us, including how these Afro-Latin American perspectives can help inform...

    Read more about Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Afrodescendant Citizenship in Latin America: Mobilization, Contestation, and Change

Pages