Conversation

Understanding Coastal Afro-Puerto Rican Ecological Knowledge with Hilda Lloréns and Carlos García-Quijano

Tue, Oct 19, 2021

10:30 AM–12:30 PM

This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register below. This event will be closed captioned.

Watch the video recording of this event here:

In this presentation “Understanding Coastal Afro-Puerto Rican Ecological Knowledge”, anthropologists Hilda Lloréns and Carlos García-Quijano discuss findings from their long-term ethnographic research in Puerto Rico’s southeast coastal communities. They will discuss the significant role of the coast and its resources for the survival and well-being of the people who live there,as well as the threats faced by these communities.The conversation will be moderated by Ryan Mann-Hamilton(Professor of Anthropology at LaGuardia Community College, and Seminar Faculty Leader of Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO) project.)

Click here to register for this event and access to the Zoom link.

Please reach out to [email protected] for accessibility accommodation requests, questions or concerns.

SPEAKER BIOS:

Hilda Lloréns is a cultural anthropologist and a decolonial scholar, whose most recent book is Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice which weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change, bringing to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable. The thread that binds Dr. Lloréns’ scholarship is understanding how racial and gender inequality manifest itself in cultural production, nation building, access to environmental resources, and exposure to environmental degradation. Dr. Lloréns’ research has been centrally concerned with critiquing structural inequalities and dismantling taken for granted notions of power. At URI, she teaches core courses in anthropology, such as Anthropological Theory, Language & Culture, Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Latinas/Latinos/Latinxs, and Gender & Culture, among others. Click here to read more about her research and publications.

Carlos García-Quijano holds a Ph.D. in ecological and environmental anthropology from the University of Georgia, along with a Master of Science degree in geology and reef palaeoecology and a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Puerto Rico. In his research and teaching, Garcia-Quijano strives to understand the dynamic and evolving relationship between people and their ecosystems. He has a special interest in how human cognition, culture, and society influence the interaction between people and the non-human environment, as well as who bears the impacts and the responsibility for environmental problems.

Garcia-Quijano’s applied goal is to help prevent environmental degradation and its differential impacts on the less powerful sectors of society. Towards these purposes he uses the tools of anthropology together with those of disciplines such as ecology, cognitive science, and ecological economics. Click here to read more about his research and publications.

This event is co-sponsored by the Latinx Heritage Committee at LaGuardia College, CUNYand by the Environment Community Humanities Oasis (ECHO) project led by Ryan Mann-Hamilton as part of the Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research from the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center CUNY.