Book Presentation and Conversation: Antropólogas y pensadoras críticas desde el Sur: de las pioneras a las feministas insurgentes y activistas
Speakers:
- Pamela Calla – Bolivian anthropologist at NYU working on gender, race, and state formation, and co-founder of Bolivia’s Observatory on Racism.
- Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj – First Maya-K’iche’ woman with a PhD in social anthropology, whose landmark case helped criminalize racial discrimination in Guatemala.
- Laura Nash – NYC public school artist and art teacher who accompanied her mother, anthropologist June Nash, on fieldwork in Mexico and Bolivia.
- Paola Bergallo – Law professor at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and CONICET researcher studying how law shapes policy on development, gender, and health in Latin America.
- Diana Gómez Correal – Colombian anthropologist and Colombia’s first Vice Minister for Women, researching peace, memory, and feminist and decolonial studies.
- Marisa G. Ruiz Trejo – Feminist anthropologist at UNACH and Columbia’s Fall 2026 Tinker Visiting Professor, researching decolonial epistemologies and gender-based violence in Chiapas and Central America.
- Moderator: Maja Horn – Barnard College in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College. Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW).
Event Summary: Join us for a presentation and conversation in celebration of Marisa G. Ruiz Trejo’s Antropólogas y pensadoras críticas desde el Sur: de las pioneras a las feministas insurgentes y activistas.
This book brings together the voices of twenty-eight women anthropologists and critical thinkers from the South, whose diverse trajectories, shaped by different ethical and political positions and life experiences, have given rise to distinctive ways of doing anthropology and of inhabiting the world. Through encounters, conversations, and interviews, they narrate their memories in the first person, recall their childhood and youth, and share the decisive moments that shaped their paths, including those in which they faced risk and vulnerability or felt their bodies most exposed.
Throughout these pages, the thinkers interviewed reflect on their beginnings in anthropology, their first fieldwork experiences, and the ways they built relationships with the people and communities they worked with. They also describe the ethics that guided their practice, grounded in respect, care, and responsibility toward the women, men, non-binary people, children, and diverse families with whom they worked in different settings. The book also brings forward their understandings of justice and memory, as well as the challenges they faced in their personal and academic lives.
Coffee and light refreshments will be served.
For online participation, please register here: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/95486017235
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) and the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS).
Registration is required for all individuals not affiliated with Columbia University, due to campus security protocols. Registration closes at 2 pm the day before the event. Columbia affiliates can attend without registering, but we kindly appreciate it if you register to help us plan event logistics.
