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

 

2019-18

Cafecito Quechua Working Group

Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea

Stanford Student Organizer: Adela Zhang and Pio Thompson


Latin American Migration Research Working Group

Faculty Advisor: Ximena Briceño

Stanford Student Organizer: Monica Ayala-Talavera, Karen Cornejo Guillen, Marleny DeLeon, Jasmín Espinosa, Andrea Flores, Christine Logan, and Lucia Lopez-Rosas


USMCA Forum (Mexico Project) 

Faculty Advisor: Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and Jonathan Greenberg

Stanford Student Organizer: Paloma Alcantara Tremari, Aurea María Fuentes Morales, Pablo Ortíz Mena Montes de Oca, 
Sergio Sánchez López, and Fernando Juárez Hernandez

2018- 17

Indigenous Languages and Cultures: Experiences and Perspectives from Latin America

Faculty Advisor: Marisol Necochea

Stanford Student Organizer: David Albán, Ana Karen Cervantes, Sara Clemente, Ryan Kertis, and Yongjian Si


Latin American Graduate Research Working Group

Faculty Advisor: Angela García

Stanford Student Organizer: Jameelah Morris and Adela Zhang


Stanford Interdisciplinary Research Graduate Latin American StudiesWorking Group

Stanford Student Organizer: Filipe Recch and Matthew Edward Nestler


US-MEX FoCUS Summit

Faculty Advisor: Bruce E. Cain 

Stanford Student Organizer: Flavia Grey and Yasmin Bashirova