Working Group Grantees
Student working groups collaborate with a faculty sponsor to organize events, including lectures, speaker series, symposia, collaborative research efforts, and the exchange of working papers.
2022- 23
Cafecito Quechua Working Group
Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea
Stanford Student Organizer: Adela Zhang and Andrea Leon
Cafecito Quechua promotes Andean issues and cultures, inviting members to share their experiences with the region. Through weekly meetings, they have been engaging the Stanford and wider Bay Area communities on the Quechua language and culture. This working group will continue to bring together academics, organizations, and practitioners working on or researching the Andean region.
Caribbean Revelations
Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Rosa
Stanford Student Organizers: Xavier “Xavi” Luis Burgos
Caribbean Revelations Working Group curated conversation and engagement with multidisciplinary scholarship on the (Afro)Caribbean and its diasporas via seminars and a colloquium with scholars from across multiple fields, such education, the humanities, social sciences, and art and art history.
Caribbean Symposium Series (CSS)
Faculty Advisor: Fatoumata Seck
Stanford Student Organizers: Kengthsagn Louis, Matt Randolph, and Joseph Wager
CSS was envisioned as part of a network that works with the Caribbean Studies Reading Group in the DLCL to offer a collaborative space to read key Caribbean texts and let 1 students present, build community, and engage with the Caribbean. CSS will be a venue for intellectual engagement with Caribbean Studies, offering the forum for urgent scholarly discourse about the Caribbean by studying the history, culture, art, and ideas of countries from the region. An investment from CLAS for CSS will do much more than ensure that the Caribbean Studies community has the financial resources to execute our 2023 symposium.
2021- 22
Cafecito Quechua Working Group
Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea
Stanford Student Organizers: Adela Zhang and Andrea Leon
The Cafecito Quechua Working Group is a graduate student-led and founded organization open to all that aims to promote the learning of the Quechua language and build community. Cafecito Quechua promotes Andean issues and cultures, inviting members to share their experiences with the region.
Hemispheric Racializations: Ideologies, Enactments, & Communities
Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Rosa
Stanford Student Organizers: Xavi Burgos, Marina Machado de Oliveira, Alexandros Orphanides
The Hemispheric Racializations: Ideologies, Enactments, & Communities seeks to engage interdisciplinary scholars in the study of ethnoracial formations throughout the context of the western hemisphere. As scholars with unique research with populations from Caribbean, Central American, and South American contexts, both in homelands and in diaspora, this working group aims to center voices and theories that may unsettle our current framings of race and racial formations and further the work of CLAS to advance knowledge that bolsters racial, social, economic and environmental justice in the Caribbean, Latin America, and its diasporas.
2020- 21
Cafecito Quechua Working Group
Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea
Stanford Student Organizer: Leonardo Velloso-Lyons
Cafecito Quechua promotes Andean issues and cultures, inviting members to share their experiences with the region. Through weekly meetings, they have been engaging the Stanford and wider Bay Area communities on the Quechua language and culture. This working group will continue to bring together academics, organizations, and practitioners working on or researching the Andean region.
Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group (LACWG)
Faculty Advisor: Angela Garcia
Stanford Student Organizers: Grace Alexandrino Ocaña and Jaime Landínez Aceros
Founded in Winter 2018, LACWG was created in response to the serious disparity between the number of Stanford scholars whose research and work focus on Latin America and the number of graduate students whose field sites, research, and theoretical interests are rooted in the region. To address this gap, since 2018 LACWG introduced bi-weekly structured workshop meetings with the support of the CLAS and the Department of Anthropology. Throughout these two years of uninterrupted work, the group has served as a multidisciplinary platform where our diverse community discusses, learns, and understands Latin America and the Caribbean. Our goal is to continue this important task in the academic year 2020-2021.
Praxis: Academic “Practice” and “Theory”
Faculty Advisor: Héctor Hoyos
Stanford Student Organizers: Joseph Wager and Juan Aurelio Fernández Meza
Praxis will investigate the state and parastate(e.g.,legal and illegal uses of force) pressures on territory and the concomitant resistance through territory. In other words, like CLAS itself, this working group aims to cultivate “scientific knowledge that strengthens social, economic and environmental justice, sustainability, inclusion and democracy” in the Américas. In discussing the tension between “academia” and “reality,” we in fact engage in a de facto questioning of the representative capacity of intellectual production and how said production participates in the world. Thought and academic research create a reflexive opening with influences exerted in cultural, political, and social media. It is at such junctures that academia and reality evince their link and enrich each other in terms of representations andtrans formative politics/policies.
2019- 20
Cafecito Quechua Working Group
Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea
Stanford Student Organizer: Leonardo Velloso-Lyons
Encuentro Nahuatl Working Group
Faculty Advisor: Alberto Díaz-Cayeros
Stanford Student Organizer: Ruben Diaz Vasquez
Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group (LACWG)
Faculty Advisor: Angela Garcia
Stanford Student Organizers: Grace Alexandrino Ocaña and Jaime Landínez Aceros