The Global Latinidades Project's Local/Global Pedagogy and Praxis Workshops involve various collaborative activities for university students and communities on and off campus. These include academic professionalization workshops, collaborative methodology workshops for community organizers and activist scholars, as well as advanced social and political theory workshops and courses. Current and planned workshops are listed below.
Significantly, this collection of workshops is undergirded by principles of solidarity—offering what is needed when it is needed as a partner in struggle through egalitarian processes and practices. This involves forming genuine relationships with interlocutors that enables partners to offer solidarity as the recipient determines. The aid is reciprocated when needed, not as repayment, but as aid from a fellow traveler engaged in the same struggle. This ultimately makes mutual aid more than mere assistance; it becomes a political practice and, ultimately, a philosophy of praxis, that is, an egalitarian ideology broadly defined.
Accordingly, the logo for this initiative includes the three-pointed red star that signifies the unity of all progressive forces. This symbol alludes to a long history of alliances across egalitarian ideologies in specific times and places. In specific historical eras such as the Spanish Republic of 1931-1939, this symbol signaled the confluence of Communist, Anarchist, and Socialists, in addition to trade unionists and other democratic forces fighting against fascism and for an egalitarian world. For Local/Global Pedagogy and Praxis Workshops, the three-pointed red star signals the ongoing dialogues among leftists who have come together to develop theories of praxis to confront urgent challenges facing us at the individual, group, and global levels.
Proseminar on Scholarships, Fellowships & Grants
Through College of Arts and Sciences and Graduate Division Dean support, as well as funding by the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English established by a generous donation by UCSB English Department alumni John and Jody Arnhold, we have created a Proseminar on Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants to assist undergraduate and graduate students in cultivating unique professional profiles, sophisticated and well-theorized research projects, and job and internship applications designed to facilitate their success in the academy and in their future careers. This involves incisive instruction on strategies and tactics for winning grant, fellowship, and scholarship applications. The results have been astounding: from 2017 to 2021, students in the five iterations of the annual Proseminar have applied for $7.1 million in awards and have received approximately $1 million in awards from the Ford Foundation, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, and many more foundations, institutions, agencies, and programs. The Proseminar on Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants is offered annually at UCSB and is also is open to select participants from multiple institutions.
Conviviality Theory & Praxis Workshop for Organizers
The Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, in collaboration with the Global Latinidades Project at University of California, Santa Barbara, (UCSB); Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, (KHM); New York University (NYU); and Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico will convene an autonomous summer learning space, or ateneo, to be held virtually (via Zoom) and in person in Oaxaca. This unique convergence brings together researchers, public intellectuals, and grassroots activists for reflection and action engaging critical issues associated with what the Zapatistas theorize as the 4th World War, understood as a longstanding counterinsurgency, ongoing war against subsistence practices and knowledges, and imposed forgetting and oblivion. Specifically, we want to collectively share experiences and insights pursuant to effective theories and practices that challenge elements of the 4th World War that include, for example, counterinsurgency, militarized policing and border enforcement, the international carceral state and other forms of informalized gendered violence while also engaging the co-construction of autonomous, convivial alternatives to the endemic violences of late racial patriarchal capitalism.
Global Spains Workshop on Conviviality and Accompaniment Praxis
The 2024 Global Spains Workshop on Conviviality and Accompaniment: Dialogues with Grass Root Organizations and Organic Intellectuals in Madrid, Spain (Global Spains) is a ten-day interdisciplinary workshop that introduces students to the ethics and methods of action-research in collaboration with grassroots organizations. The workshop focuses on non-extractive, collectivist modes of knowledge production and various models of organic intellectual praxis. This international workshop is sponsored by the UCSB Global Latinidades Center, Duke University’s Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South, and Madrid’s grassroots organization YoSoyElOtro, and emphasizes global transatlantic approaches to various ethnic and area studies––Latina/o/e/x, Latin American, Global, and allied and intersecting fields. This partnership brings together US students with Spanish faculty and grassroots cultural arts and social movement organizers in Madrid at a transformative moment in southern European and hemispheric contexts.
Southern Critique Workshops & Courses
Southern Critique: A Comparative, Interdisciplinary and Multi-Regional Workshop on Latinx Social Theory and Philosophy is a collaborative project with Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center at the University of California, Riverside, in addition to faculty at the University of California, Merced, and the University of North Texas. This initiative proposes a series of workshops, courses, and colloquia focused on interdisciplinary training in social theory and philosophy that emphasizes a southern hemispheric critique that builds on the work of Antonio Gramsci, José Carlos Mariátegui, and subsequent generations of Marxist critical geographers. The intensive teaching and research activities offer instruction, training, and mentoring in the fundamentals of historical materialist theories of praxis, and their philosophical foundations in continental philosophy as well as southern hemispheric philosophical traditions. This initiative includes collaborative close readings of foundational Marxist texts in addition to various subsequent generations of theorists, including the Frankfurt School theorists, Black and Latinx Marxists, as well as decolonial Indigenous and post-Marxist theorists. Southern Critique: A Comparative, Interdisciplinary and Multi-Regional Workshop on Latinx Social Theory and Philosophy is a multidimensional initiative that seeks to fully integrate the study of historical materialist social theory and philosophy–particularly Marxist Studies—as integral to the field of Chicanx and Latinx Studies.
