This interdisciplinary, edited collection will foreground the challenges of researching and representing activism in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. Researching justice, resistance, and feminism in the Americas invariably produces tensions: Between the researcher and the subjects; the researcher and her academic discipline; the researcher's insider and outsider positions; between competing interpretations of history. For example, how does one research a movement centered in a tourist destination without turning the activists into objects of the tourist gaze? How does one research against a group or nation's dominant leftist political narrative without undermining a social justice agenda and alienating herself from activists? How does one center the voices of resistance without speaking directly with those protagonists? How does one navigate the contentious field of human rights advocacy without further victimizing the survivors while still acknowledging their suffering? How does one reconcile the divide between activists and academic discipline as audience? How do activist scholars negotiate generational gaps that may exist between themselves and the academic and activist communities to which they belong? This anthology focuses on tensions like these that arise in the process of doing research connected to activism. Taking Risks is meant to serve as a dialogue among scholars committed to social justice scholarship.
While providing a theoretically and empirically original case study of an historical or contemporary social justice movement, contributors will be asked to address several topics in their essays: 1) How does a feminist ideology or methodology influence your research agenda and position; 2) what sort of tensions have you encountered in your research; 3) how/have those tensions altered your research agenda, and 4) how have you chosen to navigate those tensions?
Presently we have contributors who have advanced degrees in: Art History, Human Development, Latin American History, Romance Languages and Literature, Sociology, Theater, and Women's Studies. Our current case-studies include: Human rights activism in Chile, political graffiti in Oaxaca, the independent library movement in Cuba, women resisting violence in MedellÃn, the Juarez murders, human trafficking and forced labor, and Chilean exile feminism. Please email a proposal of 900 (or less) words, a 150 word abstract, and a two-page CV to Julie Shayne jshayne@u.washington.edu. Proposals should clearly explain your research and how you imagine writing a chapter that both presents your research and the tensions inherent in it in a methodologically and theoretically compelling way.
Deadline for submission: June 13, 2011. If your proposal is accepted I will need your final draft by August 1, 2011. Papers should be approximately 35 double spaced pages (~12,000 words).
Julie Shayne, Ph.D.
Lecturer, UW Bothell
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
Center for University Studies and Programs
Affiliate Associate Professor, UW Seattle
Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Julie Shayne is the author of the book “They Used to Call Us Witches: Children Exiles, Culture, and Feminism”.