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Patricia Richards (Sociology, Women’s Studies, Georgia)
Mar 4, 2016 @ 3:30 pm
Recollections of Violence and Survival in the Life Histories of Mapuche Women Elders
Recorded Video (Mediasite)
Recorded video (YouTube) — no slides
Cosponsored with UWM’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)
Professor Richards’ talk draws from the preliminary results of a life history project focusing on Mapuche women elders residing in ancestral Mapuche territory in Southern Chile.
The initial goal of the project was to explore how these women’s life experiences have been shaped by gender, racial, and colonial marginalization, and the extent to which their knowledge stores and life experiences reflect or legitimize aspirations for autonomy and decolonization. The most salient theme in the life histories gathered so far, however, is violence: colonial violence, the violence wrought by the Pinochet dictatorship, everyday symbolic and structural violence, and interpersonal violence in the context of their closest relationships.
Without sinking into a miserabilist reading of their life histories, Richards looks to explore how Mapuche women elders’ stories of violence and survival can both inform and speak back to contemporary theorizations of coloniality and sovereignty.
Brown bag lunch discussion
“Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge”
Friday, March 4
12 noon Curtin 939
Patricia Richards is associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at the University of Georgia; her specialty areas include sociology of gender; global sociology; race, class and gender; social movements, and qualitative methodology. She is the author of Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights (University of Pittsburgh, 2013) and Pobladoras, Indígenas and the State: Conflicts over Women’s Rights in Chile (Rutgers, 2004).
Established in 1965, CLACS is designated a National Resource Center for Language and Area Studies by the U.S. Department of Education, jointly with the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program at UW-Madison.