Description:

Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the next seminar of the Fall 2021 quarter, happening next Thursday, November 11 at 12-1 PM US CT. Professor Héctor Beltrán (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will give a presentation entitled “Making Latinx Makers.”

Abstract: Popular “diversity in tech” discourse proposes ways to encourage “different” participants to join events aimed at empowering these communities through technology. Here I examine ethnographically how members of racialized groups are called upon to manage these differences themselves within maker and hacker collectives. To explore constructions of Latinidad within makerspaces I bring together scholarship on prototypes and participatory models with conceptual work on incompleteness advanced by Latinx Studies scholars.

Héctor Beltrán is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his background in computer science to understand how the technical aspects of computing intersect with issues of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.