Abstract
In a September 2020 New York Times op ed, activist-authors Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Mónica Ramírez called on the USA media and publishing industry to step up their inclusion of Latinx editors and contributors stating plainly that across the board, “we must transform media and cultural power structures and amplify and defend Latino storytellers…[and] we also have to deconstruct the cultural context that got us here.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture was founded with the mission to provide an accessible, digital platform for scholarly analysis and critique of historical and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art and visual culture. Since the University of California Press started publishing LALVC in winter 2019, the new academic journal is rapidly acquiring a reputation as an essential resource for a range of interdisciplinary scholars, students, activists, and artists to engage in the productive cultural deconstruction called for by Méndez Berry and Ramírez. In this paper, I consider how LALVC has also become a critical pedagogical platform with the unique potential to provide students and their instructors with access to contemporary debates in the short-form dialogues sections that accompany each issue of the journal. As the days of quarantine, lock-down, and coronavirus continue to spiral out into the future, LALVC Dialogues provide academic content to students in a shape and space that not only feels manageable, but engages their participation in the field by providing them with a pioneering tool with which to reconsider Latin American and Latinx cultural capital in the twenty-first century.
Presenters
Emily EngelVisiting Lecturer, Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus: Critical Thinking, Soft Skills, and Technology
KEYWORDS
Pedagogy, Publishing, Digital humanities, Latinx, Latino, Visual culture, Online discourse
