Description:

Joanne Rappaport will focus on how collaboration unfolds in a collaborative research project, taking as an example Orlando Fals Borda's work with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (ANUC) in the 1970s on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. This collaboration resulted in a series of graphic histories of peasant struggle meant to inspire peasant readers to action. She juxtaposes this example to other work in collaborative ethnography from Latin America and the United States, in order to comprehend how divergent appreciations of the meaning of research and the nature of historical narrative resulted in a novel methodology for collaborative research.

BIO: Joanne Rappaport teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Her areas of interest include indigenous literacy in the Andes, the role of intellectuals in social movements, race in colonial Latin America, and collaborative ethnographic methods. She is author of The Disappearing Mestizo (2014), Intercultural Utopias (2005), Cumbe Reborn (2004), and The Politics of Memory (1990), and co-author with art historian Tom Cummins of Beyond the Lettered City (2012). She has also co-authored with activists a history of the bilingual education program of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (Colombia), ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela . . .?, published by the indigenous organization. She is currently working with the personal papers of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda on how he articulated the notion of participation in his pilot work on participatory action research in the 1970s on Colombia's Caribbean coast.

Sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program

Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Department of Anthropology